It’s the women in town who turn to look when Hollis walks by. They pity him, they really do. He lost not only his wife but their boy, Coop, who was sick every day of his life, as weak as paste and in need of constant nursing from the start. It’s lonely for a man to live like that, and the women in town know who among them have gone home with Hollis over the years. They’re not always the prettiest or the youngest. They’re women who know the score, who won’t make demands, who may have a husband who works nights or a boyfriend in the next state. They’re the ones who know that Hollis isn’t about to give them anything they want or need, but who still can’t turn him down. He’s been hurt, that’s what the women who have slept with him say, and he needs someone. They don’t have to mention that getting older has only served to make Hollis even more handsome than he was back in high school, when they would never have had a chance with him, when he wouldn’t look at anyone but March Murray.
Tonight, Hollis searches through the cabinets for the canister of salt, then reaches for his jacket, which is so worn the fabric is past repairing. The same is true of the house; it has begun to come apart, and this pleases Hollis. He hasn’t had the place painted in fifteen years, hasn’t repaired the roof, which leaks in twenty-six spots when the rain comes down hard. The destruction of the house which once belonged to the Coopers is a small, but enjoyable, satisfaction. Hollis likes to find cobwebs in the parlor where Mr. Cooper used to smoke his cigars. Annabeth Cooper’s perennial garden, of which she was always so proud, has been destroyed by Japanese beetles and mildew. In Richard Cooper’s bedroom you can hear the raccoons, who are living in the walls, and in Belinda’s old room the edges of the marble mantel have disintegrated into dust. The Wedgwood, so elegant at parties, is currently being used for the dogs and is now so chipped no one would imagine this china came from London in wooden crates, and that each bowl and plate had been wrapped in a swathe of white cotton.
Hollis slams through the side door, ignoring the sleepy red dogs, who all rise to their feet to follow, working out of instinct, just as surely as Hollis does. These dogs are strays, the ones people say are descended from mongrels abandoned to breed with foxes over a hundred years ago. Whatever their lineage, the dogs look evil, with their coarse coats and yellow eyes; their piercing yelps often frighten off deliverymen and letter carriers. The dogs are sensitive to Hollis, however. They know his moods, and when he pauses to take a deep breath and look at the sky, they push against each other and whine. They’re anxious when Hollis slows down, but Hollis is merely appreciating what’s around him. He’s always favored October, with its gloomy, cold core, and he can never get enough of looking over his land. Why shouldn’t he stop to appreciate all that he once envied and now owns? He gave up everything for this land, so he might as well stand here and feel that it’s his.
The year when Henry Murray brought Hollis home, there were more than fifty racehorses at Guardian Farm. Hollis had no interest in horses, and doesn’t to this day, but March was fascinated, not only with the Coopers’ horses but with their wealth. Her father gave most of what he earned away and much of the work he did after hours was pro bono. Even though Henry Murray was an esteemed member of the community, March had only one pair of new shoes a year whereas Susie Justice, for instance, had four or five. At that point, March cared more about shoes than she did about the welfare of the poor, and maybe that’s why she was interested in the Coopers’ horses: each one was worth more money than her father would ever manage to earn.
Hollis remembers that he and March hid on the far side of a stone wall so that March could count the horses. It was a hot, windy day and March had to keep grabbing at her long, dark hair so it wouldn’t fly into her eyes. The wind echoed, like a drumbeat or a warning, and everything smelled like grass. Mr. Cooper’s horses were hardly the same species as the bony haybags found in backyards along Route 22. These horses had run at Belmont and at Saratoga; they were so fast they could outrace the storm clouds that came down from Fox Hill.
As soon as Hollis married Belinda, he sold off nearly all the horses, and now there are only three in a barn large enough to house dozens: his son Coop’s lazy, old pony; the ancient workhorse, Geronimo, who used to pull bales of hay into the fields for the thoroughbreds; and Tarot, Belinda’s horse, who killed two of his riders before they took him off the track. Hollis hates them all. He hates the sound and smell of horses; he hates the stupid ones, who shy at garter snakes and pools of rainwater, and he hates the smart ones, like Tarot, even more. Right now, as he nears the barn, Hollis can hear the pony whimpering. It’s a faint, small sound, but it sets Hollis in mind of how horrible a horse’s scream is. Before he can stop himself from thinking, he sees a white horse fall to its knees. It falls like snow, like a drift which can cover you completely. Well, Hollis isn’t about to dwell on that. He turns off all consciousness when it comes to the years he was away. Some people might say three years isn’t that long to be gone, but Hollis knows it’s time enough to have a hole form inside you. It’s exactly the right amount of time to leave you empty, forever after, no matter who you once were or what you once might have been.
Tarot is in the first stall, which has been his home since the day he came to the Farm. A bay thoroughbred, dark as mahogany, he would have brought more at auction than any of the horses Hollis disposed of, if his reputation hadn’t been so notorious. Breeders up and down the East Coast still refer to Tarot when they want to call up a horse whose potential is chewed to pieces, a champion who went so haywire he might as well have been sold for dog food. Even though he would behave for Belinda, people in the village still talk about the times when Tarot escaped. Some of the shopkeepers-Sam Deveroux, who owns the hardware shop, for instance, and Mimi Frank, who styles hair at the Bon Bon-insist that Tarot breathed out fire when he ran through the town. They swear there was one warm evening in May when he singed all the lilacs on Main Street. To this day, the flowers that bloom on these bushes carry the scent of sulfur; they’ve been known to burn a child’s hand, if one is foolish enough to grab for a bunch of the blossoms.
People in town wonder why Hollis bothers to keep a worthless old racehorse around. The women like to think it’s a mark of respect for Belinda, who loved the horse so, but the men joke it’s simply because Hollis refuses to take a low price for his property. Neither assessment is correct. Hollis retains the horse because he is a waste, just as Hollis himself is. Every night they face off, and each time they do, they despise each other a little more. This feud doesn’t mean that Hollis would ever get rid of Tarot. All in all, you don’t take the only creature mean enough to be your equal out behind the barn so you can shoot him in the head.
“Hey, buddy,” Hollis whispers as he approaches Tarot’s stall. As usual, the thoroughbred looks right through him. “Fuck you too.” Hollis is always astounded by how damned haughty a horse can be. “Double fuck you.”
On that day when he and March first came here, they were caught by Jimmy Parrish, who now uses a cane and spends all his evenings at the Lyon Cafe, spouting racetrack statistics and boring people silly. Back then, Jim was the foreman at Guardian Farm, and he took his job seriously. It was a dog who gave them away, one of Annabeth Cooper’s stupid poodles, who yapped like crazy and led Jimmy Parrish right to the stone wall where they were hiding.
The Coopers weren’t friendly with people in the village and
Hollis and March knew they weren’t wanted at the Coopers’, but they came to count horses anyway. Hollis can still hear the wind the way it was on the day they were caught. He hears it in his dreams, and when he walks across the pastures he now owns. It was impossible to make out what March was saying over the roar of the wind, but Hollis could see her foot was caught between two stones. Annabeth Cooper’s poodle was snapping; it had surprisingly large teeth for a dog of its type, and it must have struck flesh, because March’s hand was bleeding.
“I’m phoning the police,” Jimmy Parrish had shouted, loud enough for them to hear.
March was wearing a white shirt which billowed out like a flag in the wind. She knew that Hollis had had several run-ins with the police. He’d been caught taking some magazines he couldn’t afford at the pharmacy, and the owner of the liquor store had ratted on him when he tried to buy a six-pack of beer. He was a city boy, brought to Fox Hill with his city ways intact, and March didn’t hold it against him. Still, one more strike and he might just be out.
“Go,” March mouthed to him. “Go on,” she insisted.
Afraid of the police, spooked by the wind, Hollis turned and ran. Hollis was a good runner, but there’s not a day that goes by when he doesn’t wonder what might have happened if he hadn’t been so fast, if he’d been caught, or if he’d simply stayed where he was. What if he and March had spent that day up at Olive Tree Lake instead of spying at the Farm? Is this how fates are made and futures cast? An idle choice, a windy day, a dog that can’t mind its own business?
Some people know the exact moment when they’ve lost everything. They can look back and see it plain as day
