A Difficult Boy Read online

  “Yessir, I would have to say that is the absolutely most ugliest horse you boys will ever see, should you live to be a hundred and twenty-seven,” said a throaty voice behind the boys.

  A man approached from the back of the farrier’s shop. At least it mostly looked like a man, though Ethan thought there was something a bit trollish about him. He was barely Daniel’s height, but wide enough in the girth that Ethan would have had trouble reaching around him. His once-black spencer had faded to bluish gray, and the short jacket was spotted with unidentifiable stains. His striped vest had trouble meeting around his middle. Ethan expected buttons to burst in all directions with the man’s next breath. The man blinked slowly through his spectacles at the boys, his moss-green eyes reminding Ethan of a turtle’s.

  “Your humble and obedient servant, Jonathan Stocking.” He fastened a wayward button on the flap of his broadfalls and tugged his vest down to cover the gap between vest bottom and trouser top. “That’s my cart and that’s my horse.” At his gesture, the vest rode up, exposing a white band of shirt across his middle. He tugged the vest down again and buttoned his jacket closed over it.

  The gelding rumbled an affectionate greeting to Mr. Stocking. The peddler thumped the horse’s hide from neck to shoulder, raising a trail of dust clouds. Eyes half closed, the gelding leaned into the thumps, his ears twitching to attention. “And a damn ugly beast you are, ain’t you, Phizzy?”

  The peddler’s voice had an odd slant to it, words gliding lazily into one another, not at all like the clipped nasal tones of Ethan’s neighbors. It reminded Ethan of a southern revival preacher who’d visited Farmington a few years ago. Mr. Stocking was older than the usual run of peddlers who passed through town. Gray tinged the stray wisps of hair poking out from his tasseled knitted hat, and his cheeks prickled with a smattering of silvery stubble mixed in with the brown.

  Mr. Stocking squinted one eye at Ivy. “Now that, my boys—” He waved a hand at the mare. She flung her head up and snorted. “That,” Mr. Stocking continued, “is a horse.”

  Stepping away from the gelding, Mr. Stocking scraped the ground with one foot and began to recite: “ ‘He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his strength: he goeth on to meet the armed men.’ ” The little man pulled himself up to his full height and threw back his head contemptuously. “ ‘He mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted. . . . He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage: neither believeth he’ ”—Mr. Stocking cupped a hand to his ear, alert to an imaginary noise—“ ‘that it is the sound of the trumpet. He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha!’ ” Mr. Stocking’s hand flew up in a wild gesture, his jubilant “Ha, ha!” sending Ethan jumping back two full steps. Ivy’s head bobbed, and her throat gurgled in something that sounded like a chuckle. Mr. Stocking’s nostrils flared wide. He turned his head this way and that like a questing hound. “ ‘And he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.’ ”

  It was a fine speech, although Ethan couldn’t help wondering how anybody, whether horse or human, could smell thunder and shouting.

  Daniel’s eyes narrowed under the shade of his cap. “He’s a mare.”

  Mr. Stocking took an affronted step away from Ivy and peered down at her nether regions. “Ah, so she is, so she is. Well, I fancy she could do her share of pawing in the valleys if she had a mind to, eh, son?”

  Ivy cast a placid eye on Mr. Stocking. To Ethan, she looked like the last horse in the world—except perhaps for Mr. Stocking’s gelding—to be pawing in valleys and laughing at trumpets.

  “What is that—Shakespeare?” Daniel asked.

  “Scripture, son, Scripture. Job. A man I’m well acquainted with, in spirit, if not in fact. ‘I will not change my horse with any that treads but on four pasterns. When I bestride him’—er, her, in this case—” He raised an eyebrow toward Ivy. “ ‘When I bestride her, I soar, I am a hawk; she trots the air; the earth sings when she touches it; the basest horn of her hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes. She’s of the color of the nutmeg. And of the heat of the ginger. She is pure air and fire. She is indeed a horse, and all other jades you may call beasts.’ ” He bowed toward Ivy with a flourish of his hat. “ ‘Indeed, my lord, it is a most absolute and excellent horse.’ ”

  The skin on Ethan’s arms and neck prickled. It was just exactly as Daniel and Ivy had looked racing across the field last week. Daniel’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped open. Then he caught Ethan staring at him and clapped his jaw shut and fussed with Ivy’s halter. Ivy arched her dainty neck as if preening at the words.

  Mr. Stocking cleared his throat, tugged vest and spencer down, and tweaked his cuffs. “That, my boys, is Shakespeare, and the next best thing to Scripture for divine inspiration. A man who has those two books has a library in his keeping.” Mr. Stocking’s reptilian glance swept Ivy from nose to tail. “So, is this fine beast yours?”

  Daniel’s mouth hardened into a sneer. “Oh, aye. And I got a dozen more back to home just like her or better. I feed ’em on naught but Seville oranges and Scotch cake and raspberry cordial.”

  A gold tooth winked from the corner of Mr. Stocking’s mouth when he smiled. “Ah, I suspected as much when I heard you speak. You’re an exiled Irish prince, then.”

  Daniel tugged at his frock. “Oh, aye, and these must be me royal robes, then, eh?” Ethan wondered that the acid in his voice didn’t burn the peddler.

  But Mr. Stocking’s grin only widened, exposing yellowing teeth, square like a horse’s. “Well, I imagine you only dress like this so’s not to make folks uncomfortable in your exalted presence.”

  Daniel pressed his lips together, an angry blush scalding his cheeks.

  Mr. Stocking’s nose jutted forward. “Now, son, I’m not mocking you. I’m only listening to your horse.”

  Daniel stepped back, sheltering under Ivy’s chin. He nudged his head against her neck. “Even a horse could tell you I ain’t nothing and ain’t never going to be.”

  Mr. Stocking’s gaze traveled slowly from Daniel’s cap to his toes and back, then wandered to the mare’s face before finally settling back on Daniel. “Indeed, son, you ain’t nothing,” he said. It was curious, Ethan thought, how his emphasis on the one word changed the whole sentence. “What you are, I couldn’t rightwise say, but that horse knows, don’t she?”

  “It ain’t no prince, anyways.”

  One of Mr. Stocking’s eyebrows settled on the rim of his spectacles. “Well, there’s princes and there’s princes, ain’t there?”

  Daniel scowled, his eyes challenging the peddler’s stare. Daniel blinked first. Then he snorted. “What you’re saying is every man’s home is his castle, and every man’s a king to his dog, eh? Well, sir, I got no home nor dog nor horse to call me own, and ain’t likely to, so you needn’t be wasting any of your peddler’s flatteries on me. I got no money to be buying your wooden nutmegs with.”

  The folds of Mr. Stocking’s eyelids gathered as he turned his turtle-gaze onto Ethan. “There’s courtesy for you. I take your brother for a prince and he takes me for a thief.”

  Daniel drew in a sharp breath, as if the peddler’s words had stung, though Mr. Stocking’s voice had been jovial.

  “You want to find your thieves, son,” Mr. Stocking continued, “you look to your storekeepers. Now you might—might, mind you—find a peddler dealing in the odd wooden nutmeg, though I’ve never seen such things myself. But a storekeeper’ll steal the teeth out of your mouth and sell ’em back to you for ivory shirt studs quicker’n you can blink. And if you did, he might steal the blink, too.”

  Daniel’s chin lowered, but not much. “I can’t debate you there.”

  “Mr. Lyman—our master, that is—he’s a storekeeper,” Ethan explained.

  “Aye, and he got no love for peddlers, neither,” Daniel added, his voice prickly. “I’d not be crossing his path, if I was you.”

  Mr. Stocking pulled a brown ropy twist of tobacco from his pocket. He cut a plug off and s
lipped it into his mouth. “Sounds like you got no love for him, neither, son.” A brown dribble trickled out of the corner of his mouth. He wiped it away with the back of his hand. “A hard man, your Mr. Lyman?”

  Daniel shrugged. “You might say that.”

  “Why not hire yourself to another, then?”

  “I can’t.” Daniel smoothed Ivy’s mane. “I’m bound.”

  Mr. Hemenway emerged from his shop, wiping a sooty forearm across his sooty bald head.

  The peddler tilted his head toward the farrier. “Now just to show a peddler can play you fair, I’ll step aside for a real horse.”

  Daniel squinted and tilted his head. “You were here first. We ain’t in no hurry.”

  Mr. Stocking bowed as elegantly as a man of his stature and girth could. “Go ahead, son. Phizzy and I will have a visit with your brother while yon smith works.”

  “He ain’t me brother no more’n I’m an Irish prince.” Daniel’s voice had a peculiar rasp to it, and he turned sharply away.

  Mr. Stocking made a thoughtful “humphing” noise as Daniel led the mare over to the farrier. The peddler turned his head and spat a long brown stream that arced over the trough and splatted into the dirt beyond. “Now, I’ve seen some peculiar boys in my day, son, but that is one of the peculiarest,” he said.

  “He was awful rude,” Ethan admitted. “But you shouldn’t’ a teased him ’bout being a prince.”

  Mr. Stocking watched Daniel discuss terms with Mr. Hemenway. The boy’s grubby brown cap and the big farrier’s shiny soot-streaked scalp bent together over Silas’s little brown account book. Ivy’s nose kept light but constant contact with Daniel, whose hand strayed now and then to her neck or cheek. “I’d say your brother looks to be as hard a servant as your Mr. Lyman is a master.”

  “He’s not my brother,” Ethan said.

  “Mmmm. So he said, didn’t he?” Mr. Stocking’s spectacled squint bobbed from Ethan to Daniel and back. “Nor quite your friend, either, eh?”

  Ethan twisted a bit of his frock between his fingers. “I—I don’t know. We’re only bound to the same master.”

  Mr. Stocking made a thoughtful noise in his throat as he studied the way Daniel held the mare still for Mr. Hemenway. Ivy pressed her forehead to Daniel’s chest, her ears cupped beneath the boy’s chin to catch the magic words that trickled from his lips.

  Mr. Stocking’s fingertips rasped against the stubble on his chin. “Your friend’s bound all right. Only not the way he thinks.”

  The boys had passed well over an hour at the farrier’s. While Daniel had held Ivy to be shod, Ethan held Mr. Stocking’s mirror so the little man could shave over a milk pan that had long ago lost its shine. Then the peddler held Ethan’s eyes and ears with the contents of his wagon. Besides the tinware, Mr. Stocking’s goods included the common peddler’s sundries: spices and ribbons, combs and patent medicines, handkerchiefs and essences. But Mr. Stocking somehow transformed the wares into exotic treasures, presenting each one with a magician’s flourish and tales of mist-shrouded lands, pirates and explorers, kings and queens, quests and battles, betrayal and treachery, so that a common brown nutmeg seemed more precious than an emerald.

  Although Ethan was sure Mr. Stocking’s tales were exaggerations, if not outright lies, he couldn’t help listening, openmouthed, spellbound as much by the way Mr. Stocking’s oratory swung from ain’ts to eloquence as by the wonder of his stories.

  When the farrier finished with Ivy, he set to work refitting a loose shoe for Phizzy, and Mr. Stocking’s talk turned to horses. He began by praising Ivy’s finer points, followed by an assortment of tales about horses historic, horses legendary, and horses entirely imaginary. Somehow he even managed to coax Daniel out of his cynical squint and cajole him from curt retorts to actual conversation.

  At last, the peddler broke up the party. “Come along, Phizzy,” he said. His horse nodded lazily and backed into place between the wagon’s shafts with the bored ease of familiar routine.

  “Why do you call him Phizzy?” Ethan asked.

  “T’ain’t really Phizzy. It’s just an abridgment of Mephistopheles.” Mr. Stocking bent to tighten buckles and fasten traces. Little puffs of dust followed his hands as they brushed against Phizzy’s body.

  “Mephizzz—” Ethan couldn’t quite get his mouth around the name.

  “Mephistopheles?” Daniel raised a pale eyebrow. “Is that Scripture or Shakespeare?” He stepped forward to adjust the harness on his side of the horse.

  “Neither.” Mr. Stocking came around to the horse’s head. “I was maybe a few years older than you when I acquired him, and I wanted to give him the grandest name I’d ever heard.” One eyelid lowered slowly. “Only you see, I didn’t know then that Mephistopheles was just a fancified name for the devil. Not altogether unappropriate, though, I must say.”

  “He acts like the devil?” Daniel untied the reins from where they’d been bunched at Phizzy’s withers and smoothed them across the horse’s back and onto the wagon seat.

  “No, but he runs like it. Wouldn’t know to look at him, though, would you?”

  Ethan could barely imagine the gelding mustering up a slow walk, never mind a run. “Where’d you get him?”

  “I was working on this farm down Pennsylvania way. One of the mares busted out just as her season was coming on her. Found her four days later and fifty miles away. When Phizzy came out, we knew she’d been up to some fine tricks while she’d been gone. From the looks of him, I’d say his dam must’ve—” Mr. Stocking peered over his spectacles at Ethan and coughed delicately. “—hem—dallied—with anything remotely equine she met. And maybe a few things as wasn’t.”

  Ethan’s jaw dropped. “But—but—a horse can’t have more’n one pa—can he?”

  One of Mr. Stocking’s scraggly eyebrows twitched. “So they say. All I know is when she came back, she was mighty tired. And I swear she was smiling. Anyway, when she foaled Phizzy, my master took one look at him and turned purple. It wasn’t just the ugly he minded, see, but with them legs, he was sure Phizzy was bound to be a cripple. He had half a mind to shoot him, half a mind to drown him, and half a mind to give him to the first blind man who came down the road.” Mr. Stocking tilted his head at Mephistopheles, who watched him through sleepy eyes. “Well, I was young and softhearted, and I figured I’d do just as well as a blind man, so I said to him, I said, ‘Mr. Griswold, if you’ll give me that colt, I swear in three years, he’ll beat any critter you’ve got on this here farm.’ ”

  “And—and did he?” Ethan asked.

  Mr. Stocking tugged Phizzy’s forelock and patted the gelding’s forehead. “Well, they never caught us, did they?” The gelding’s head bobbed lazily.

  “So you stole him,” Daniel said.

  “Mr. Griswold gave him to me, remember? Only being kind’a simple and trusting, I neglected to have him put it in writing.” Mr. Stocking waggled a stubby finger at the boys. “Let that be a lesson in business to you fellas. Anyways, when he saw how that colt was shaping up, he began to see the money bags. Imagine bringing a beast like that to a race, huh? Who’d ever think he could win? But he could, see, and that’s how we made our living the first few years.” Mr. Stocking patted his stomach. The vest had ridden up a full three inches by now, the lower button straining hard. “But I got a little roundish, see, and had to come up with another line of work.” Mephistopheles nuzzled Mr. Stocking’s belly and fluttered his lips over the peddler’s buttons as if he’d pick them off for a snack. The peddler scratched the gelding’s ears with one hand while his other searched his pocket. He pulled out a stale-looking biscuit and blew the lint from it.

  “And that’s why you’re a peddler?” Ethan asked.

  Phizzy took Mr. Stocking’s offering with a slobbery wiggle of his rubbery lips. Mr. Stocking dried his palm first on the seat of his trousers, then on Phizzy’s neck. “I’ve been about every sort of traveling something you can think of, except a toe dancer. I’ve been a circus rider
, a juggler, a writing master, a singing master, a dancing master, and an actor.” Mr. Stocking drew himself up to his full height and placed a hand upon his chest. “I’ve been heroes and scoundrels and wizards and kings. And even a queen or two, when the company was short of the fairer gender.”

  Ethan smothered a giggle at the idea of Mr. Stocking bewigged and begowned, reciting in a falsetto voice.

  “Seems to me,” the peddler continued, “with all there is to see and do, it’s a crime, a pure and unholy waste, to plant yourself down somewheres and never get up again.”

  “Where’ll you go next?” Ethan asked.

  “I’ve been all the ways down to Florida, and all the ways up to Canada.” Mr. Stocking’s index finger swooped down toward the ground, then up toward the sky as he spoke. “So I estimate there’s only one way left for me, ain’t there?”

  “West,” Daniel said almost reverently, as if he were talking about the Promised Land.

  “That’s the place.” Mr. Stocking’s hand disappeared into his pocket and extracted a crumpled piece of paper. Ethan caught a brief glimpse of bold letters and exclamation points as Mr. Stocking gave the handbill to Daniel. “Yes, indeed. You want adventure, son, you go there.”

  A tremor of excitement and trepidation quivered inside Ethan. “Won’t you be scared?”

  Mr. Stocking wreathed one arm around Phizzy’s nose and held the other in the air, finger pointing to the heavens. “ ‘We mocketh at fear, and are not affrighted.’ ” A chuckling whicker from Phizzy echoed Mr. Stocking’s Ha, ha!

  “Mmm-hmm,” Daniel said, his head bowed over the paper. “Ain’t old Phizzy a bit on for such a trip?”

  “Appearances are deceiving, son, deceiving. Mephistopheles would no more be still than I would. You couldn’t part us any more’n you could part Castor and Pollux, David and Jonathan, Lewis and Clark, Napoleon and Bonaparte. It’s not every day you find a horse like this one.” Mr. Stocking gave Phizzy’s shoulder a proud thump.