One Hundred and Four Horses. Mandy Retzlaff

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the mfuti and msasa. In the back of the truck, Jay stood upright, his falcon Buffy blinkered and leashed to his wrist. Eagerly, he urged me on.

      I could never resent these midnight trips—Jay had never been a boy suited to school like his brother, and it was only out here in the bush that he had found real confidence—but I had been awake for eighteen hours already. At a high ridge Jay unleashed Buffy; she turned and dived in the headlights of the truck, her talons sinking into one of the tiny nightjars that made their home here.

      Jay looked at me. “Let’s go higher.”

      “Darling, aren’t we finished yet?”

      Jay frowned. “I think we should go higher.”

      This, I thought, must have been how Patrick’s father used to feel.

      Though Pat refused to admit it, Jay had certainly inherited his demanding stubbornness from the Retzlaff side of the family. As a boy, Pat had built up a flock of more than one thousand chickens. He had known every last one of them by name, kept meticulous records, and even co-opted several of his father’s workers to oversee the chicken project while he was away at school. The young Patrick Retzlaff would run his father ragged, demanding feed and materials for the chickens at every available opportunity, and, over the years, cost the family a small fortune in the process.

      Whenever Pat left for boarding school, the farm would breathe a sigh of relief not to be under his tyrannical chicken gaze for a few weeks. Yet, one day, they made a mistake that would haunt them for the rest of their lives. While Pat was away, they decided to slaughter a few chickens for the deep freeze, convinced that, upon his return, Pat would never know. The cook was dispatched with a large ax and selected a few of the plumpest specimens. Grisly business done, he returned with a brace of big birds for a banquet.

      A few months later, Pat returned home for the school holidays and headed straight to the chicken house. In minutes, he had zoned in on the missing chickens and promptly thundered into the farmhouse to confront his father. The young Pat was so distraught that, at last, his father had to confess: son, he intoned with an air of genuine solemnity, they have been eaten.

      It was the very last time that anybody touched any of Pat’s chickens.

      Tonight, at the wheel of the car, I opened my eyes, realizing too late I had fallen asleep. The moon hung, beached in a reef of cloud, above the line of the bush, and I was thankful I had not driven us both off the road.

      “Darling, are we finished yet?”

      “Just once more,” Jay insisted, feeding a scrap of some suspicious meat to Buffy.

      I could have sworn her eyes turned on me with a keen, knowing air.

      “Once more,” I insisted. I knew it would mean at least three more flights.

      It was hours later when I drove the truck back into Crofton, heavy bags under my eyes. I roused Jay, who had fallen asleep, careful to avoid Buffy, who pierced me with her stare.

      We were tramping past the stables where Frisky slept when I saw Pat striding out of the darkness between the barns. The tomatoes were packed, the trucks loaded, and he looked exhausted.

      “Just an hour until you have to deliver these tomatoes, darling,” he said.

      I could have killed that man and his animal genes.

      From Crofton’s window I watched Kate. She had spent the morning doting on Deja-vous. The foal’s leg was healing only slowly, for infection kept setting in, reopening the wound. Now, the wound was dressed and she was gamboling in the garden. Her scarred leg was stiff and she would always carry it heavily, but the sparkle in the young foal’s eyes told me she did not mind, and the sparkle in my daughter’s told me it had all been worth it.

      As an exhausted Deja-vous settled in the garden to sleep, Kate sat in the shadow of the mango tree with her schoolwork spread around. Oliver, our gardener, kept calling to her from where he was working on the edges of the garden, and each time, Kate returned his call with a smile that, like Pat’s, took over her face.

      When I looked up next, her schoolwork was abandoned, loose pages caught up by the wind and only rescued from disappearing into the bush by Oliver’s quickly flicking pitchfork. Now Kate was up in the leaves of the mango, hauling herself from branch to branch with the agility of any of the monkeys that made daring raids on Crofton to take the tree’s fruit.

      I remembered standing in this same place only days after we came to Crofton, watching as Paul and Jay swung from the same branches. That day, Kate stood beneath, marveling at her brothers, forbidden herself from following. Now she could climb faster and higher than they ever would. That was the thing about Kate: she saw what braveries her brothers could accomplish, and she always went one better.

      In the highest branches, she stopped dead. Then, from the corner of Crofton, came Jay and his friend Henry, the son of a neighboring farmer. Both of them were holding their pellet guns.

      In a sudden scramble of limbs, Kate jumped down from the tree just as Jay and Henry were disappearing into the first fringe of the bush. Quickly, she made to follow.

      From the kitchen window, I watched her go. Jay, I knew, was going to be furious. I had seen her do this before. Jay and his friend were going to take potshots at birds in the bush, but it distressed Kate so much that she simply had to do something about it. Rather than run and hide, she had taken to sabotaging their hunts by frightening off the birds they were stalking. She would clap her hands and sing loud songs—and it had been a long time since Jay had proudly brought back a feathery carcass to Crofton farmhouse.

      Kate followed him from deepest gully to highest ridge, along winding game trails and farm tracks, down to the tall reeds on the shores of Two Tree Hill Dam and up along the rivers that held our home in their cradle. With every step that she took, she clapped her hands wildly, oblivious to her brother’s orders, his threats, his pleading looks. Every time she clapped her hands, the birds on which Jay had trained his pellet gun took off, a chaos of flapping wings and cries of alarm.

      In this way, Jay was deprived time and again of his kills. At dusk, he tramped back into Crofton, dejected, his pellet gun still full. When he threw it down in disgust, Kate clapped again.

      “Don’t worry, Jay. If Dad found you, you know what you’d have to do …”

      Jay had been under strict orders ever since he unwrapped his prized pellet gun that he could shoot a bird only if he planned to eat it.

      Jay looked at Kate.

      “You’re just jealous,” he said, “that you can’t shoot, too.”

      But when they lined up tin cans in the garden and took potshots at them, Kate won every time.

      She took after her mother, you see.

      In later years, Frisky began to wither. Pat had never known her true age, but the lines deepened in her face, she lost weight that she would never regain, and when she and Pat set out across the farm, driving what few cattle we had left into their crush for dipping or simply reliving the days of their youth, she lived up to her name less and less often. No longer was she frisky; now, she was stately, quiet, reserved. A gentle horse in her dotage, slowly winding down.

      In 1998, she left the paddocks and moved into our garden. She liked to lie down СКАЧАТЬ