The Grave Maurice

know. Until then she never wanted to speak of it; it was something she would have to settle for herself, probably, if at all.

And she’d learned the limits also the first time she’d seen the mares in those two barns. When she walked down the line, rubbing each of them on the rump or flank, she saw a number of them were pregnant. Yes, some of them were unmistakably in foal.

The stillness was eerie, unnatural. Fugitive sounds-a tiny rustle of hay, the soft movement of a tail flicking- were all. Nell thought these horses projected a resignation unlike any she had ever witnessed.

She studied the stalls. The panels separating the mares were thin. Where the panels on each side came together with the dividing wall, they squared off a little platform that she might be able to sit on if there was any way to climb up there. Nell did not know why she wanted to do this; for some reason she felt it was important. Maybe once she got up there, she’d know.

She found an old crate against the wall that she pulled to the entrance of the stall and got up by standing on it and letting her arms power her the rest of the way. Then she sat down, legs dangling. “All right,” she said. She could touch the heads of the two horses in front and if she turned around, the two horses behind her. Maybe that’s why she’d wanted to get up here; up here she could reach them. From here she could see down the rows in both directions. She turned her head and saw they were looking at her. I wonder if they think I’m something else to be drained of fluids. On the ceiling, fluorescent lights stuttered and shimmered. It was day, but the lights were on and she wondered if this was to extend daylight or spring to confuse the mares into foaling in the dead of winter.

Nell looked toward the end of the barn and, seeing no one about, began to hum a few bars of her favorite song, and then to sing in a voice barely over a whisper. “Love walked right in-” She went on with what she could remember of it.

If she balanced carefully, she could lean back on the narrow ledge of the panel. She looked at the light, which threw a veil of sickly white over the horses. It might as well have been a layer of frost covering everything-the barn, the mares and her, even the stillness, even the singing.

FIFTEEN

She had this recurrent nightmare: a vast track of sand, an endless sweep of dunes, some ridged and shadowed like steps that a moment later would be swept away and another bit of geography would form in the sand. Along the horizon she saw a chain of what she took to be camels until her dream eye, coming closer, told her they were mares. There were no stalls, but still the mares were chained. But to what? There was only the sand. Yet they couldn’t move. They stood exposed to sun and wind, a black line across the farthest dune.

And the awful silence, except for the wind, the subtle shifts in the sand, the wind rearranging the dunes.

Every time she had awakened from this dream, she recognized the peculiar amalgam of shame and remorse was caused not by what she had done, but by what she hadn’t. She dropped her head on her raised knees. Sixty mares: there was no way in the world she could get all of them out, or even most of them. No matter who the people there thought was responsible, they would still have increased security. But she depended upon their thinking: if it was she who had taken the mares, why hadn’t she taken her own horse, Aqueduct? That was why she’d left him for last: it might be the one thing that would throw them off the track.

Her head stayed down and she shook it back and forth against her knees when an image was too painful. Don’t go there, don’t go there. One thought struck her as incongruous: did they miss her? Despite wanting to blow the place to kingdom come and kill every last one of them-face-to-face, so that she could see the cold fear in their eyes-despite this she wondered, did they miss her? It was all too complicated, too hard to grasp, an emotional thicket, tangled and barbed.

In this dream tonight something had brushed against her face that wasn’t the wind. There was nothing else there. She awoke in the deep dark rubbing her face, and saw Charlie, the little foal that she had brought along with its mother, looking around the open barn door. Charlie had been inspecting her and apparently hadn’t decided whether she was trustworthy.

She fell back against her straw pillow, glad to have been awakened and thought about the dream again, for every time she had it she would go to sleep one person and wake up another, her sense of herself subtly changed, as was the surface of the desert in the dream. What clung to her nearly sunken consciousness was that there was something she had to do.

I’ve done enough.

No, you haven’t. Somebody else? Perhaps. But you? No.

“Oh, who says?” she had yelled one night at the stars, scaring the horses, who started whinnying and snorting. She had gone into the barn and from one horse to another, offering each lumps of sugar, a stroke on the cheek and an apology.

Tonight a soft whinny came from the barn. The mother Daisy probably looking for Charlie. The foal trotted back to the stall.

They had grown so used to being tethered; it was difficult now for them to move around. They were anchored here by ghost chains, as the amputee still feels a ghost leg. A limb there and not there.

Again she thought of the dream and the chains in the sand. But you couldn’t chain anything to sand. She wondered if she herself was that line of dark horses on the horizon, that she felt chained even though she had not been, literally. This had not come about merely as a result of her forced imprisonment in that gabled room under the eaves. “When can I go home?”

There was no answer.

She had felt herself to be a much younger self, more vulnerable, less aware, one who had regressed. Her passivity, while it had lasted, was a means of self-protection, a mildness that would appease these people and would convince them she wouldn’t try anything.

From the window of her room she could see the courtyard and stables, three long lines of them. This had shown her it was a stud farm, like Ryder’s, only slightly larger. But down below there was little activity, which she found strange. Only Aqueduct (and why had they wanted him?) and a few other horses were led from their stalls to the exercise ring. She would watch from her window for hours, interrupted only by a tray brought in by a girl who’d been told not to speak to her. But the girl, Fanny, having told her she was not to speak, continued speaking (feeling, apparently, that she had already broken the rule when she opened her mouth). Fanny was trying to earn enough money to go to America. This was the girl’s single wish. She had an aunt who lived in Chicago.

“Do you take care of the horses ever?”

“Oh, no,” Fanny answered. “It’s got to be done just right.”

“What has to be?”

Fanny shrugged.

A little while after she’d been here, Nell realized she would have to stop acting fifteen and be herself again, with every ounce of self-control and resourcefulness she could muster. She would never find a way out of this place if she couldn’t convince them it was safe for them to give her a little freedom. The “When can I go home?” part of her would have to go and that other part of her, cool and in command, would have to reassert itself. It did not actually take a lot of effort; it had come over her quite naturally. Sometimes she wondered about this.

This composure and self-command might have been induced by the horses, the way she knew a person had to handle them. One had to be calm, consistent, efficient and dependable. You couldn’t be a certain way one day and a different way the next.