Spookily so, the way she would nip at Emma out of the blue, like payback for some slight she had suffered. Other times, like now, the horse simply refused to do anything. Just swing her head up and look at her and then turn away. It was almost a challenge.
“Okay,” Emma said, blowing the bangs from her eyes. “Let’s try this again.”
She leaned into the horse’s shoulder and tapped the foreleg until Smokey relented and lifted the leg. Emma scraped dirt away from the hoof but when the pick touched the frog, Smokey winced and swung her head down.
“Okay, okay,” Emma cooed, leaning harder into the horse to keep Smokey from dropping her leg. She gently plucked away the straw and dirt to get a better look at the hoof. Thrush was common enough and the mare had it when Emma bought her three years ago. She had treated the hoof then but every spring it would flare up again. This season was no different. She let the bay drop her leg and smoothed her palm down its withers, talking softly into her ear until the horse settled. She’d have to mix up some more sugardine and treat it.
There used to be two horses in the barn. Both quarter horses, bay Smokey and a young pinto that Emma had fawned over. Skittish and harder to control than the older bay, the pinto had been untrained and barely broken. Emma suspected the animal had been badly used. She spent hours with the pinto, just walking him around the paddock to gain its trust, easing him into a saddle. She had only sat him a dozen times, each time a struggle to keep the horse from bolting or bucking. It would take time and Emma was patient but reality had bitten down and knew she couldn’t keep him. Arguments with Jim over the expense and Emma crunching numbers but to no avail. She sold the pinto in the fall and still regretted it. There was simply no way to justify the expense to keep the little pinto. It was sold off, the money dumped into the black hole of debt and Emma had bought two goats on the cheap from Norman Meyerside down the road, companion animals for lonely Smokey. They were odd looking animals and Jim hated them but she didn’t care. Smokey seemed calmer with the nannering things around and that was all that mattered.
She rooted around the cupboard, pulling down what she needed to mix an ointment for thrush. Her dad’s own recipe, but there wasn’t a lot of betadine scrub left. There wasn’t a lot of anything, she thought looking over the shelves of the tack room. They had scrimped on everything to get through the winter, making everything go twice as far and Emma winced at her meagre supplies. This, their current state, the thriftiness of it all. If their situation didn’t improve this season, she’d be forced to sell the bay. There was just no other way. The horse wouldn’t fetch a lot of money but she simply couldn’t keep Smokey anymore. God forbid something happened to the animal that required a veterinary visit.
The horse stood patiently and swished its tail as Emma washed and treated the infected hoof. She cleaned the other hoofs for good measure and led the bay out to the upper paddock where the ground was dry. The two goats clopped out of their stall and followed them out to the grass like dutiful escorts. Emma looked up when she heard the tractor rumble up out of the back field.
It didn’t sound right, the rhythm of the engine was off and a sharp pop belched from the exhaust. It laboured into the yard and Jim killed the engine. He removed a side panel and reached into the engine of the old Massey Ferguson. He snapped his hand back suddenly, burning his finger. The index finger was bent at a slight angle, having been broken as a kid, and was forever getting burnt or cut or hammered.
Emma closed the gate and crossed the yard towards him. “When are you going to put that old thing out of its misery?”
“About the time we can afford a new one, I guess.” Jim sucked on his blistering finger and then flapped it in the breeze. “Which means never. Day after never.”
She nodded at his hand. “Do you want some ice for that?”
“It’s nothing.” He stopped flapping his hand. “Did Kate call?”
“No. What time was she supposed to be here?”
“An hour ago.”
“I guess that means it didn’t go well,” she said.
“Just means she’s late is all. Kate’s always late.”
Jim looked up at his wife and smiled and shrugged. Her nose had already turned a bit red from the sun, as it did every spring. The rain and overcast skies of the last two weeks had finally given way to three straight days of hard sunshine and Emma had spent every moment outside soaking it up. That first blast of sunshine tinged her nose pink and brought out the freckles on her cheeks. In a few days her nose would peel and then darken. A spring ritual as reliable as tulips opening up along the veranda.
Those three days of sun had been enough to dry up the dirt road they lived on and Jim could see a spume of dust rising above the trees. A car coming down the Roman Line.
“Maybe that’s her,” he said.
A Ford Explorer turned into the drive and trundled through the potholes. The wedgewood blue exterior shiny and clean, the grill free of bug spatter. Not a farm vehicle. The Explorer hewed up beside Jim’s battered pickup and the driver stepped out. A dark haired woman in nice clothes, good shoes crunching over gravel. Kate Farrell smiled wide and waved at Jim and Emma. An old friend of the Hawkshaws, and mayor of the township of Pennyluck, Ontario.
Emma took her husband’s hand and gave it a little squeeze for good luck.
2
“THEY SAID NO.”
Kate believed in being blunt, especially with bad news. Sugar coating it or delaying it just made the bad news all the worse. The sooner it was laid on the table, the sooner you could deal with it. An article of faith that Kate employed as gospel in her earlier career but especially sacrosanct in her second year as mayor. The Hawkshaws took it hard.
Emma had offered coffee but no one really wanted any. Kate suggested they walk for a bit and enjoy the sun, so they strode down the fieldstone fence into a copse of poplars near the creek.
“I tried everything I could,” Kate said. She turned her palms up in a gesture of crying uncle. “I’m sorry.”
Jim could already feel the end closing in. Like something out of an old monster movie, Jim imagined his creditors as giant locusts flitting over his house, devouring it whole. The clapboard, the windows and even the shingles on the roof. Their armoured heads swivelling around, dark alien eyes as they picked the house clean to the studs while he and his wife and son stood at the end of the driveway and watched. He clutched at the timothy heads swaying at his knee. “They didn’t like the offer.”
“The council dismissed it as soon as they saw your financials.”
Emma soured at that. Again, the money. She squinted against the sun. “What about just leasing the land, short term?”
Kate shook her head again. “They wouldn’t consider that either. Which is just ridiculous and I told them so to their faces.” She leaned against the stone fence and looked out at the untended field on the other side. “All this land and they won’t let anyone touch it.”
The land in question bordered the Hawkshaw property on the eastern side. Eighty two acres of land cleared almost two centuries ago, left untouched for generations. There was a house on the property, a big timberframe with a stone foundation, still standing all these years. Its clapboard weathered to husk, windows like cored-out eye sockets. The last occupant was a caretaker who had died in the seventies. The fallow land was held in trust by the town but for whom, Jim had never found out. He doubted the town council even knew, it had been this way for so long. Empty acres and lost records.
It was all bullshit. Jim had inquired about the property with both the council and the bank but was told flat out the land was not for sale and discouraged from making an offer. That’s when he had turned to Kate.
Kate Farrell had grown up in Pennyluck, not six miles from the Hawkshaw place. Jim and Kate knew each other as kids but neither would say they were friends back then. Different grades and deep class divisions. Townie kids didn’t blend with the farm kids, each side despising the other for completely bigoted and erroneous reasons.
Kate had fled for university and then on to jobs in Windsor, Toronto and Montreal before coming back home
