Mister Boots

Mother is sick. She’s had bad spells before every now and then, so at first we don’t think much of it. But then this seems worse. She’s rocking back and forth and saying she’s sorry to be groaning, but it makes her feel better so would we please excuse her.

It’s the middle of the night. Even those mornings when my sister hitchhikes there aren’t a lot of cars or buggies way out here, so I say, “I’ll get the first horse I find and I can be halfway to town in an hour.” But my sister says that I don’t know the towns and I don’t know where the doctor lives, and that I should stay with Mother. (I’m scared. I don’t know what to do to help her.) My sister says for me to go get a horse and she’ll ride it.

Then I get the idea of Mister Boots. I believe him—I did all along—he really is a horse. He’s still limping some, but he’s much better. “I know a horse that, if you fall off, he’ll stop and put you back on himself himself. I know a horse you can cluck to and kiss to or tell him in words, or point your chin to where you want to go. Moonlight Blue.” (Of course Moonlight Blue. I’ll have to remember to tell Boots what I named him.)

I don’t know for sure if he can help us, but at least he’s sort of a grown-up, and might know what to do. Well, my sister’s a grown-up, all the way up to twenty, but she sure doesn’t seem like it.

It’s as if Moonlight Blue knew when he heard me gallop up. I got myself a neighbor’s horse and rode to our tree. He’s there, under the tree, looking as if straight from the moon, black mane and tail, of course four black feet. In this light, his coat is silvery, but I can see he’s what they call a “flea-bit gray,” which is a typical Arab color. A smallish horse, and every rib showing. I reach out, and he blows on my hand like they do. Then he whinnies. He starts way up high and goes way down. I recognize that whinny.

My sister reaches out to let him blow on her hand. She gets an apple and splits it for him with her own teeth. She rubs his poll and down his nose. (Think of rubbing Mister Boots’s poll!) After he finishes the apple, he leans low and chews at nothing to show, horse way, that he’ll do anything she wants him to, and then he puts his bony forehead against her breast, which is not a good sign, so I’m glad to see my sister is just as scared to mount up as she always is.

He lopes the smoothest, most collected-up lope I ever saw, and I know my sister will be all right, at least with the riding part.

Mother is curled up on the floor by her bed. I wish she would get in it. I curl up next to her, not too close because, with all this pain, she can’t bear to be touched. There’s nothing I can do but worry—about her and my sister. I mean, maybe Boots is a bank robber. What if he runs away with her? I guess I don’t really think he will, and I guess she’d have sense enough to jump off if need be. Except she might freeze up and not be able to. Except he did care about our tree.

Then she doesn’t say anything. Later—practically a half hour later, she seems to feel a little better. She gets into bed and sips at the warm water I bring her. (That was all she wanted.) She says, “I worry about you. I don’t want you to live so much in your imagination. I don’t want you believing in everything you think up, like you can fly. Things are scientific.”

(She tells me this all the time.) “But what were you going to tell me? You said you needed to tell me things you should have told before?”

“Oh, I’m better now, so no need. We’ll pick a nice time to talk later. Just the two of us. Maybe down by the ditch.”

“Roberta, Roberta. I’m sorry about your name.” (What does she mean by that?) “I never dared call you anything but Bobby.”

She reaches toward me. (She’s always a great hand-holder—when she isn’t holding her knitting needles.) Now she reaches way out. “Honey . . . Roberta, you know those funny old clothes. . . .” And then she keels right over, banging her head on the floor.

I try to lift her back on the bed and when I can’t, I straighten her out and put the pillow under her head. I keep calling, “Ma. Mother.”

I go outside then and listen and look. First I’m listening and looking to see if my sister and the doctor and Mister Boots are coming back. I need them. But then I listen and look around at the night. We’re not religious, or if we are, nobody told me, but I look at the moon and then I go down on my knees as if to some moon god. Mister Boots was right; everything is magic. I feel the breeze on my cheeks, as if it’s Mother’s hand.

I say, “Ma,” again. I whisper it, as if I could call her back from somewhere out there. I guess I must have loved my mother. I never thought about it, but I feel sorry—sorry for myself and sorry for her because she worked so hard. Sorry I didn’t help any. And maybe there was something I should have done to help her not die.

Then I think: What am I supposed to do now? Say a prayer? Wash the body? Sing a sad song? Homeschooling didn’t teach me anything at all about this. But my sister should be here to sing with me, and we should wash Mother together. That’s the kind of thing Mister Boots would say. So I wait. Boots said that a lot of life was being patient. I said, “Yes, if you’re a horse and tied up all the time,” but he said, “Every creature—people, too,” and he was right.

Dawn. (Time is going by pretty fast.) The sun is just below the mountain. I want to tell Mother, “This is how it is on the morning after you died, everything pink and orange and purple. Rain over toward town, maybe on my sister and Moonlight Blue.” Maybe the rain is tears. I would like a little rain. I would like to look up and have wetness on my cheeks.

I don’t seem to notice time anymore. It goes on until the sun is twelve o’clockish. I finally see the long tail of dust, and pretty soon I hear the rattle of what turns out to be the doctor’s car. Mister Boots isn’t with them . . . nor Moonlight Blue. Pretty soon they’re close enough so I can see my sister is crying and she doesn’t even know about our mother yet. Her whole front is wet even though she holds the doctor’s big handkerchief wadded up against her cheeks. I get worried.

That starts her off even more. The doctor has to tell about it for her. “He was stolen weeks ago. Other horses escaped at that time, too. They got them all back except this one. They said his ropes and halters were still hanging there, tied to the rail. It had to be—”

My sister interrupts. “A person! The halters were unbuckled.” Once she gets started talking, she can’t stop. “They said it might have been me. After all, who needs a horse more than I do? And there I was, riding him. They say he should be shot—because of his legs. When we got to town, he collapsed. I couldn’t stand for him to be shot.”

But the doctor says, “Son, I saw that horse. He should be put out of his misery as soon as possible. I don’t like to see an animal suffer.”

“I don’t do horses, and I’m not so sure he can be fixed. He’s never going to be much good again even if his legs do heal. He’s not worth two dollars. You’d have to pay two dollars to have him hauled off.”

My sister slumps down on her knees just like I did. Then the doctor looks more sympathetic and reaches to touch her shoulder. “I’m sorry. Can you children manage?” Then he asks my sister how old she is and when she says twenty, he says, “I thought you were hardly seventeen,” and then again, “Will you manage?”

I ask my sister, “Where did Mother keep the money? Pay the doctor, and I’ll need some more to get Moonlight back. Hurry!”

We look in all the normal places a person would hide money and some not-so-normal places, but we don’t find a single dollar, and we don’t have time to do a good job of hunting. Mister Boots might be in trouble already.

We give the doctor a white crocheted afghan for payment. It looks special, like for a wedding. I’ll bet it’s worth a lot more than his visit out here for no other reason than to say, “She’s dead.”

I gather up a few knit things in case I need to pay for Mister Boots and for a coffin for Mother. I should be thinking about her, but I hardly can because Mister Boots might be being shot right this very minute.

I guess if you find a man lying naked in a horse stall with ruined legs, you don’t doubt at all anymore that this man is the same as that horse. Mother said I shouldn’t believe things like this. Those were practically her dying words, but I just can’t be the way she said to be.

At first I think he’s dead, too. I know horses often die from trying too hard. But then I see the whites of his eyes flicker—catch the light for a second as he opens them a little bit.

Then he really looks at me and tries to speak, but only a blowy, horsey noise comes out. I get him water in the horse bucket and help him drink.

His feet and ankles are so swollen I wonder if he can stand up. I round up horse leg wraps and horse bandages and bind his feet and ankles. He grunts and throws his head back and forth. I know I’m hurting him. Then I cover him with dirty old sweat-stiffened saddle blankets to keep him warm and after that with straw to hide him.

I’m going to have to steal him some clothes all over again. Why not the doctor’s? He was hardly any help at all, and yet he took that beautiful white afghan.

I tell Mister Boots I’ll be right back—that I’m off to get him clothes. I’m not sure he hears me. (He’s way beyond caring if he has any clothes on at all, let alone if they’re nice.)

Lights are on at the doctor’s house. (They have electric lights!) It’s a big house, so I’m wondering, Why did he need to take that afghan when he has such a big house and car and everything?

I look in the downstairs windows. It’s just the kind of thing I like to do at our house back home. I see the doctor and a wife and, off and on, a maid. I hear music. (They have a Victrola!) My mother’s afghan is right there, on the wife’s lap—the most beautiful thing in the room, though there’s lots of beautiful things. I get sad again, thinking how my own mother made such a nice thing.

I want to hurry back to Mister Boots, but I have to do this carefully or it’ll just take longer and I might get myself arrested and never get back to him. He’ll starve with nothing but hay and alfalfa to eat, and if he turns into a horse again, he’ll be shot first thing.

I sneak in. It’s no harder than when I sneak around our own little house. (It’s sometimes good being small and thin and always barefoot.) I never can sneak up on Boots, though. He has horse sense.

I take a fancy suit with a vest. I take a white shirt. He’ll have clothes that match his long nose and his long slim hands.

I’m as bold as I always am. I hide in the hall closet until the doctor and his wife climb the stairs to bed. Then I hide under the back stairs and watch the maid go off to her room.

I have to wake Mister Boots again. I have to dress him all by myself, and it’s hard since he’s so loose and floppy. It’s good the clothes are a little too wide. I forgot to get a belt so I use a halter rope. He looks dressed up except for that one thing—and his feet.

If you’re stealing things anyway, you might as well steal other things to go with them. You might as well steal a big strong hairy-footed horse that can easily hold two people because I know Mister Boots can’t hold himself on a horse by himself. I’m not even sure how to get him up on one. (Together we don’t weigh more than one person, but I want to ride that big shire. There might never be another chance.)

“Mister Boots.” I have to shout. I have to shake him. He’s feverish. That’s why he’s so slippery. “Boots, you have to help me get you up.”

He comes to a little bit. I prop him partway on the ladder to the loft. I hook his arm over the rung above him, I move the horse in close. It’s the wrong side, but these big horses are the sweetest of all; they don’t mind anything. What the horse will mind is that we’re leaving his partner horse behind. They’ll make a racket calling to each other. I hope nobody comes to check on them.

I’m not worried about being seen once we get going. I’ll just say I’m helping this drunken gentleman get home after a bad night. Except I doubt if there’s a single person in town who wouldn’t recognize the big shire. Well, I still could be helping a drunken gentleman to get home.

Now and then Mister Boots mumbles something and I say, “What?” and he says, “I won’t ride horses,” and I say, “You have to, just this once.”

My sister is waiting for us way out by the gate. As if she’s been there all this time. She’s kneeling in the sand, and when she hears us clop-clopping she gets up and runs to meet us, and then walks along beside us. “Poor Moonlight Blue,” she says, and then I know she knows.

We bring the big black shire right up to the porch steps, and lift Boots down. (Mostly we drop him.) We sort of drag him inside to the couch. After we straighten him out he does look elegant in the doctor’s clothes—except for being rumpled and with straw here and there. I hadn’t realized—not really—until this very minute that he could look this good.

My sister kneels beside him and kisses him and not just once. Cheeks and lips. Calls him Dear. Thank goodness he’s too far gone to notice.

I suppose, with these good clothes, he’s all the more attractive to her. I should have thought of that. I should have known she’d fall in love with somebody who was a horse. If I know my sister, and I do, it’s too late to do anything about it—it’s gimpy old Boots, too old, too thin, too odd.

I ought to be getting that big horse back (I’ll be accused of stealing him and Moonlight Blue), but I don’t want to leave my sister and Boots alone together. I want to see what’s going to happen when he comes to.

“Our father! When did we ever have a father? Besides, they’re not gone, you know. Boots probably left them out under our tree. And I didn’t give him fancy ones.”

We get Boots cleaned up as best we can and covered up, then—I can’t believe it—my sister measures him and starts on a sweater! (She picks red. Well, as a horse, being cream with fly-speck color, he would look good in red, but it doesn’t seem right for the man.) I suppose she knits because she’s nervous and knitting is her whole life. I know she was set to work knitting as soon as she could hold a knitting needle without poking her eye out. Not like me. Just knitting away and hardly even looking out the window. I never thought about it until right now.

And another thing I never thought about: our father—that I even had to have had one. Was that what Mother was about to tell me when she started out, “You know those funny old clothes. . . . ”?

She’s sitting on the floor next to the couch, leaning her shoulder against Mister Boots’s shoulder. I never saw her knitting on the floor before. I hardly ever look closely at her, but she really is beautiful. She has naturally curly hair, and now it curls all around her face, pasted to her cheeks with sweat. (I must look like our father. My hair is straight and black.) She’s staring at me, thinking hard, then she says, “He never came back.”

I’m thinking about how those clothes are odd, like that pink turban with the jewel, and silky things, and two pairs of pants with a satin stripe along the sides.

She stops knitting. “I hope,” she says, and then she just sits. She looks exactly the way I feel, like everything is falling apart. “I hope,” she says again, as if there never would be any, “he doesn’t.” She starts to knit again. She’s so fast she has a couple of inches already. “He wasn’t around much, but when he was, he was teaching you to be part of his magic show.”

She looks at me like I’m being ridiculous, but she goes on. “Once you . . . (You were lots smaller and thinner then. We wondered if you’d live.) Once, you flew, and that one and only time, you flew away. To escape him. I didn’t see it, but it had to be that. You were all the way out at the creek. Mother didn’t want us to believe things like that, but how could you be that far away without flying? I found you. I brought you home. You were hardly three years old.

“When our father was here, we had plenty of money, though being poor without him is better than being rich with him. He whipped all three of us, but back when I went to school, the teacher did that all the time, too. Even the girls, though not as much. Of course our father thought you were . . . You know.”

“How else did you get way out there? You must have landed hard and broke your elbow. But sometimes I wonder if he broke your arm himself—by mistake. He wouldn’t do it on purpose. He wanted you to grow up to be part of his show, but he didn’t know his own strength.”

Right then Mister Boots groans a long, shaky groan. My sister turns around and puts her arm across his chest. “It’s all right,” she says. “You’re going to be fine. Just rest.” She’s talking to him as if to some wild animal that’s hurt and frightened. My sister never has dared talk to hardly anybody, but now she goes on and on. She lifts his head and holds water to his lips. “Your feet are in bad shape, but we’ll have the doctor here soon.”

“We have plenty of clothes.” She’s completely calm about it. “Help me dress him and then go take the big horse back and say we need a doctor—for a different reason.”

But Mister Boots is trying to lift himself up, not using his hands, just his elbows. His wrists are almost as badly off as his feet. My sister helps. She props him on cushions and pillows. She says, “There now. Are you in pain?”

“You’re . . .” His voice is hoarse and hardly sounds out. Breathy. Wobbly. Just hearing it I would have guessed right away this was, once upon a time, a horse. “You’re the one,” he says. “Did I get you there?”

They look straight out at each other. My sister never does that with anybody, and horses don’t usually do that unless to challenge.

“You did—of course you did.” She hugs him. For heaven’s sake, she would never have done that before, and she shouldn’t! She’s pulled his head right in close, next to her breasts. That’s the second time if you count Moonlight Blue leaning against her right after she fed him apples.

“Jocelyn!” She’s always shocked at me, but now it’s my turn to be shocked. “You don’t even know him!” But I might as well be out talking to our tree.

Boots is still staring at my sister with his caramel-colored horse eyes, as if he can’t believe she exists at all and yet here she is, existing after all.

“He’s not your kind of person. He’s my kind of person. Crippled forever, most likely. That’s what the doctor said.”

She brings him an apple again and feeds him exactly as before, by hand, bite by bite. I say, “Mother’s dead, for heaven’s sake. She’s lying in the other room, dead!”

I say I will, but I don’t move. I can’t bear to leave them alone together. I hope Mister Boots is in bad enough shape to keep his hands off her.

I don’t want my sister to see him naked. How can she know what men are like, being who she is? It’s different for me; I’ve already seen everything. And then there’s all those scars he has. Should she see those?

We undress him down to the scars—all sorts of scars. (Some have got to be horse bites.) He’s not much more than a skeleton. My sister gives me a look, as if I’m to blame for something.

“I don’t know about the scars, and I fed him absolutely everything I could find around. Didn’t you notice the leftovers were always gone?”

She picks out the fanciest of those fancy shirts, light blue with ruffles in front, and a pair of those pants with a stripe down the sides.

My sister says for me to take the doctor’s clothes out to the trash bin and burn them up, but I’d hate to do that. I picked them out special. And I like how Boots looks in them, more a gentleman and not so much a circus performer. Mother would have liked them, too, because they’re regular, normal clothes and yet dressy.

I take the clothes out, but I dig a shallow hole in our vegetable garden where the earth is soft. I fold the clothes up, nice and neat, and bury them.

Mister Boots is asleep when I come back in. My sister says he dropped off as soon as he ate something. She says, “So fast he nearly fell off the couch.” It looks like a real sleep, so I think now would be the best time to take the big horse back to town. My sister is settled on the floor knitting again. I’ll bet she’ll be more than half done with that sweater by the time I get back.

So we look again—all the same places we did before and different ones, too. “There has to be some. How much did you make last time?”

“What if we don’t ever find any money? What if we’re rich and don’t even know it? Is that because our mother thought our father would come back and take it?”

“And. . . Roberta . . .” (It’s as if Mother being dead made my name all right to say out loud.) “You’ll have to buy a coffin.”

“Take my order book. Perhaps the undertaker would place an order for some knitting instead of money. Tell him I’ll be fast.”

But I’m on my way out, and I don’t look back. If I’ve made her angry, I don’t want to know about it. I thought I had a secret person of my very own, and an important job helping him, and that he’d die without me, but here it is, all backward, and now he’s half dead because of helping my sister.

And he’ll be telling her about shying in the wind for the fun of it. I can just see them, leaning their heads together, and the horsier he is, the more my sister will love him.

When I get to town there’s arguments going on all over the place, but everybody relaxes when they see me ride up on their big black horse (the shires are the most valuable things in town). When they see how I’m so willing to pay for his rental later, and how my mother died and all, and that I need a coffin, they all calm down and feel sorry for me.

I pretend I don’t know anything about what could have happened to that flea-bit gray with bad legs, but they say, “Not much of a loss.”

They tell me that back when my father was around, they were suspicious of my whole family, though they like my sister. Lots of people make a point of checking if she’s waiting for a ride, and they pick her up whenever they see her.

“But we don’t know anything about you, Boy, except we see you out by yourself in the middle of nowhere loping around as if you had someplace to go. But why did you borrow this big shire when you could have ridden home on something smaller?”

The doctor thinks I’m the one who stole his clothes, but since I went straight to his house and asked him to come back to ours, he’s not sure. But he doesn’t want to come anyway. “That’s a godforsaken place,” he says. “It’s a long way, and I’ve already been out there once for nothing.”

I get to have another ride in the doctor’s car, and this time I pay more attention and enjoy it. I ask a lot of questions about how much it cost and how much gas costs, and that makes the doctor happy.

There’s some cows on the road when we’re partway home, and I yell, “A-ooo-ga,” out the window, and they move right off. I sound exactly like a real horn. I do it when we get close to our house, too, so the doctor doesn’t have to honk his horn to let my sister know we’re here. The doctor doesn’t even thank me for honking for him. I guess he thinks I’m making a lot of racket for somebody whose mother just died.

Every so often I catch myself making a mistake about myself, and it’s not all my fault. Here I am thinking: When I grow up to be a man, I’ll get myself a car like this one. But right after, I wonder if women ever have them. If they don’t, I could be the first.

I can smell the strong smell of valerian tea even before the doctor and I go in the door. Mister Boots is awake, lying propped up on cushions and pillows, and my sister sits beside him rubbing his head just above his ears as if he’s still a horse. It’s so clear I think the doctor will see right away how this is the ruined horse that collapsed practically at his door . . . the scraggly horse beard, the scraggly mane.... (His hair is exactly the length of a mane.) And the doctor does look shocked, but then he says, “Is this your father?” so I know he’s shocked by the clothes. Which is my sister’s fault.

The doctor does what he has to do—and gently. He gives us a bottle of painkiller for nothing, so I guess he’s not so bad. Maybe he likes me better because I asked so many questions about his car and how to drive and how hard it is to find gas stations.

He’s going to take Mother to the undertaker. He tells us not to watch, but I do. I want to be sure he treats her properly. He wraps her up in a sheet and puts her in his car. Jocelyn gives him Mother’s best dress for the undertaker to dress her in.

Then he comes back to talk to me privately. I suppose since I’m the boy. He leans close and whispers, “That man will be a cripple for the rest of his life. You’d best be prepared. I’ll come again sometime next week and see how he’s getting along, and check up on both of you, too.”