A Difficult Boy Read online

  The dust from Phizzy’s hide must have caught in Daniel’s throat. He turned away, coughing into the handbill. Ethan thumped Daniel’s back three times hard before he finally straightened, eyes glistening, cheeks red. “I daresay.” He wheezed between the words.

  Mr. Stocking cocked an eyebrow. “It’s more’n looks makes a horse, son.” His spectacles winked at Daniel. “With some horses, there’s no training ’em for love nor money. Some—they’ll mind you fine, but it’s only their dinner they’re looking out for. But every now and then, you’ll come across a horse who’ll give you his soul. Maybe he’ll mind someone else if he has to, but for you he’ll run or pull or jump until his heart bursts.” He ran a tender hand down Phizzy’s neck. “When you get a horse like that, it don’t matter whose name is on a piece of paper. That horse knows who he belongs to, and there ain’t no telling him no different.”

  Mr. Stocking’s turtle-gaze loitered over Ivy, then pinned Daniel hard. “And there ain’t no telling you, neither, is there, son?”

  Chapter Twelve

  “D’you think it’s true?” Ethan asked. “What he said about Mephis—Mephis—about Phizzy, and all—all the other things he told us?”

  One of Daniel’s shoulders rose and fell under his frock. “Maybe half. He’s a peddler, after all.” The lead rope dangled loose between Daniel’s fingers. Ivy trailed behind him like a dog walking to heel.

  They turned south down the back road that led over Slocum’s Brook. The quiet, narrow lane meandered between swampland and woodlots and parcels too rocky to till. It was the long way back to Mr. Lyman’s, shadier and less traveled than the broad main road that ran between pastures and fields. They still had hours yet until dinnertime, and Daniel seemed intent on using every second.

  “He was right about Ivy,” Ethan said after a long silence.

  “Aye, she’s grand, ain’t she? ‘A most absolute and excellent horse,’ ” Daniel quoted.

  “Not that. I mean, it don’t matter what anybody else thinks. Ivy thinks she belongs to you.”

  Daniel frowned and rubbed his chin. “I don’t s’pose nobody’ll be wanting her opinion on it.”

  If Mr. Stocking was right about Ivy, Ethan mused, then maybe he was right about Daniel being a prince. Ethan’s head floated with visions of coaches and castles. He became so caught up in his fancy that he was startled when he realized that Daniel had led the mare off the road into the woods.

  “Where’re you going? That’s not—” Ethan stopped short when Daniel grabbed a handful of Ivy’s mane and swung himself up onto her back. “But—but Silas said—” Ethan sputtered.

  Daniel thumbed his cap back. “Silas said not to let him hear about me riding, didn’t he? I’ll not be telling him. Will you?” He reached down a hand. “Come on.”

  “I—I—I can’t,” Ethan said, though his heart danced at the idea. The specter of Mr. Lyman’s discipline loomed too large.

  Daniel straightened and shrugged. “Suit yourself, then.” His legs tightened on Ivy’s sides, and the mare stepped forward. “I’ll meet you by Stearns’s orchard,” he said over his shoulder.

  A tiny empty space opened up inside Ethan and grew as Daniel and the mare receded into the woods. He lurched into a run, his shoes hissing through the leaf mold underfoot. “Daniel, wait! Wait for me!”

  Ivy stopped and gave Ethan an inquisitive glance. She nodded, seeming to second Daniel’s invitation.

  “All right, lad. No need to shout.” Daniel slid closer to the mare’s rump. “Here—you sit in front. That way I can keep you from sliding off.”

  Ethan held out his arm for Daniel to grab and jumped when he felt Daniel pull. He ended up sprawled on his belly across the mare’s back. He blinked at Daniel’s grimy naked toes dangling below his face.

  “Ah, well. It’s a start, I s’pose.” After a bit of twisting and tugging on Ethan’s braces and trousers, Daniel righted Ethan and turned him so he faced forward.

  Ethan grabbed a double handful of Ivy’s mane. “All right. I’m ready.”

  “No, you ain’t. You got to hold on with your legs.”

  Ethan clamped his knees tight around Ivy’s sides. He felt her warmth through his trousers, felt the rhythm of her breathing. If he stayed very still, he was sure he’d feel her heart.

  Daniel clucked to Ivy and shifted his body in some mysterious way.

  “Oh!” Ethan said, tipping from side to side. He clung harder with his knees, but it was like trying to ride a barrel. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ivy’s tail slap at Daniel’s calves with barely contained fury. When he looked forward, he saw Ivy’s ears bent flat against her head.

  “She doesn’t like me,” he said.

  “It’s ’cause you sit like a sack of grain. No, like a kettle. A sack of grain’d at least have some give to it, wouldn’t it, now?”

  “I’m going to fall off.” Ethan shifted his rump as he slid first one way, then the other. The bony ridge of Ivy’s spine jarred against his backside.

  “Aye, if you keep sitting like that. You got to . . . you got to . . .”

  Ethan twisted to watch Daniel’s face. Daniel frowned, tipped his cap off, and scratched his head hard. “Hmmm. I never had to talk it before.” His body shifted. He seemed to be analyzing what each muscle and joint was doing when. “Let’s start with your legs, eh? And then we’ll move up.”

  Daniel’s legs seemed to dangle loose from his hips. Ethan’s own clamped viselike at the knees, so tight that his thigh muscles trembled.

  “You got to make your legs long, see? You got to feel like they was a couple big long ribbons that you’d like to wind ’round her sides and tie under her belly.”

  “But your legs are long,” Ethan protested.

  “Well, they weren’t when I was your age, now, were they?”

  Ethan chewed his lip. “You said you fell off.”

  “Oh. I s’pose I did.” Ivy’s hooves thudded softly in the damp leaves as Daniel thought. “But I didn’t have no one to hold me on, now, did I?” he finally said. “Now let go your hands and just use your legs like I told you. It’s having your knees clapped on so hard that’s got her jumpy.”

  Ethan imagined stretching his legs all the way around Ivy’s round rib cage and tying his ankles in a neat bow underneath her. As his muscles stopped squeezing in and started stretching down, Ivy’s belly swung gently from side to side like a fat, lazy pendulum. One coppery ear stood erect, twitching front to back.

  “There, see? She can feel it, too,” Daniel said. “Now, just keep your legs on her like that, like—like—like Lizzie maybe sewed your trousers to Ivy’s ribs, see?” One of Daniel’s hands let go of the rope and moved toward Ethan’s waist. Ethan’s middle tensed.

  “I ain’t going to tickle you. I just want to see what you’re doing with your back.” Daniel pressed a palm against Ethan’s spine. “You’re—you’re like a board here.” He nudged the small of Ethan’s back. “That’s no good. But you can’t be loose like a string, neither. It’s like—like—ah, I don’t know.” He untangled Ethan’s hands from Ivy’s mane and placed them on his waist. “Here, you feel what it’s like.”

  Ethan groped at Daniel’s hips, then his spine, then his waist. “I can’t tell anything,” he said. It felt so silly he had to laugh.

  “Maybe you could if you’d stop giggling like some fool girl. Here—like this.” Daniel slid forward so that Ethan’s shoulders rested against Daniel’s chest, his spine along Daniel’s belly, their legs touching. “Can you tell what I’m doing now?”

  Ethan concentrated, then nearly squealed with sudden understanding. “I see! It’s like your top’s all still, but your bottom moves with her, and your middle’s sort of like a—like a—a hinge.”

  “Well, not quite a hinge, but nearly so.”

  “Let me try,” Ethan said.

  Daniel slid back again. Ethan felt the mare’s steps move through him, legs to backside to hips to belly. The mare’s ears pricked forward.

  “Look
, Daniel, I am riding! And Ivy likes it!”

  “Well, she’s maybe not minding you so much. But you ain’t riding. You’re only not falling off. It ain’t riding ’til you can tell her what to do and have her do it.”

  “Oh.” Ethan chewed his lower lip. “How do you do that?”

  “Well- l- l- l- l . . .” Daniel scratched his head. “I don’t exactly know. I mean, I just sort’a think what I want to do, and she does it, see?”

  “She reads your mind?”

  “Of course not. It’s more like—like I get to thinking about having her walk faster, say, like this.” Ivy pushed forward with longer strides. “And while I’m thinking in me head, me body’s thinking about it, too, and that’s how she feels what I’m thinking. Or sometimes it’s the other way ’round, and I can feel her wanting to run or jump, and I just say, all right, then, lass, and go along with her.”

  “It sounds so easy.”

  “It is—now. But I et a lot of grass and dirt and such before I knew the way of it.”

  “Well, then show me the right way.”

  “I don’t know if I can. I can maybe tell you a bit how it feels, but to say you got to move your legs this way or that, or shift your arse just so . . . It’d be like trying to teach somebody to walk. You can do it fine without thinking, but let you start saying, ‘I’ve got to put me foot down so, and bend me knee just this much,’ and you’d be getting so muddled up with how much there is to it, you’d fall over.”

  “Then how am I s’posed to learn?”

  Daniel sighed. “You can begin by not jabbering so many questions at me. Just be quiet and feel what she’s doing, all right, lad?”

  Ethan reached out with all his senses, trying to find the mare’s rhythm. He felt the soft one-two-one-two of the mare’s hooves, felt the same rhythm in her belly as it swayed between his legs, the same rhythm in Daniel’s chest as Ethan leaned against him, and the same rhythm in his own body as hips and legs and spine responded to Ivy’s motion.

  Silencing his mind and body to concentrate on Ivy heightened all his senses. Warmth surrounded him: the mare between his legs and under his hands, Daniel at his back, the dappled April sun lightly toasting him through his woolen frock. A soft haze of red-tasseled maple blossoms and barely breaking yellow-green leaves softened the trees with memories of autumn and promises of summer. When he closed his eyes, he could feel the heartbeat of the earth waking up to the new season. The sun made warm patterns of gray and red and orange on the insides of his closed eyelids as the mare walked from shadow to sun to shadow again. There were no Lymans, no chores to get back for, no debts to work off, nothing but him and Daniel and Ivy and the woods forever and ever.

  Then the earth bounced underneath him, and he had to open his eyes. His seat rose from Ivy’s back and plopped down again with a jarring thunk that clanked his teeth together. He’d no sooner landed than he was back up again, then down once more.

  “Wh-wh-at-at’re you-ou-ou do-o-o-ing?” His words vibrated in his throat with each jounce.

  Daniel slowed the mare, but not enough to break her bouncing gait. “Trotting,” he said. Ethan felt Daniel’s body rise and fall with the mare’s, as if he’d somehow glued the seat of his trousers to her spine.

  “How-ow-ow-ow d’you-ou do-o that-at-at?”

  “Same’s walking. Just follow what she does. Go up when she does, and down when she does.”

  It was impossible. As soon as Ethan could figure out that the mare was down, she was already up again. “I ca-an’t.”

  Daniel’s legs shifted behind him. “Well, then, we’ll have to run.”

  Ethan’s panicked “No!” was smothered by a rush of terror and delight as the mare sprang forward and they burst out of the woods. For an eternal second, he thought they’d plunged off the edge of the world and hung suspended in a great green-and-blue bubble. They’d cantered halfway across the field before he realized that they were running across a bowl-shaped meadow that rolled gently down to a pond. Ivy’s body gathered and stretched and landed, the flex and release of each muscle precise and distinct. The grass flashed beneath her hooves, but Ivy and Ethan and Daniel seemed not to travel at all, but to float while the bubble of grass and sky whirled by them. Ethan wanted to cry out with the joyous terror of hanging poised between flying and falling.

  Daniel laughed for both of them, a harsh exultation, like a raven’s cry. But all too soon his laugh turned into an unfamiliar word with the slant of a curse to it. Ethan’s nose was suddenly buried in coarse chestnut hair as Ivy’s canter broke into a jarring trot, bursting the bubble that had held them.

  Ethan’s head still swirled with the motion of the canter. The grass and sky rocked around him, like a pan of water sloshing after being jostled. “What?” he asked.

  “It’s that bloody peddler fella again,” Daniel said.

  Ethan looked toward the pond. A flash of brightness struck his eyes as the sun glinted off Mr. Stocking’s spectacles. Mephistopheles, stripped of his harness, peered lazily over the peddler’s shoulder.

  Daniel sighed and nudged Ivy toward the peddler.

  “For such a homely boy, you surely do some of the prettiest riding I ever seen,” Mr. Stocking said.

  “Ain’t you got some tinware to be selling or some such?” Daniel asked.

  Mr. Stocking crossed his arms. “Ain’t you got some fences to fix or some fields to plow?”

  “We ain’t wanted back ’til dinner. Not much point in going where we ain’t wanted, is there?”

  Mr. Stocking guffawed and spat a fat, juicy stream. “Son, you got some way of turning words around. If you could tame that brogue, I could make a peddler of you for sure.” His eyes narrowed behind the glasses while one finger traced the roll of flesh under his chin. “Then again, it might be handy to have someone who knows a little Irish talk, what with all your tribe moving into Springfield and Westfield and Pittsfield and all them other fields. You could help me sell a pile of teapots to your town cousins.”

  “I got no kin in any of them places.”

  “No?” The peddler tugged his ear. “No, I don’t s’pose you do. Ah, well, it’d be a shame to waste you on peddling anyways. Now, the circus—that’d be the place for a man of your talents. Such riding!” Mr. Stocking nodded to himself. “It’s on account of your race, I imagine. Equines are in the Irish blood, so they say—passed down from father to son.”

  “Me da never sat a horse in his life. Me grand-da neither, from what I been told,” Daniel said coolly.

  Grasping his lapels, the peddler struck an exasperated pose. “You’re bound to take offense, no matter what I say, ain’t you, son?”

  “I ain’t taking nothing. I’m just wondering how you come to be here.”

  “Just following your advice. You said your Mr. Lyman is death on peddlers, so here I am, giving him a wide”—the peddler’s arms spread to indicate just how wide—“berth. Anyway, it’d be a waste of a perfectly good horse-riding day to spend it peddling . . . or farming, hmmm?” One eye closed solemnly behind the peddler’s spectacles. “And Phizzy’s feeling a bit sprightly now he’s got his shoes fixed, ain’t you?” The only show of energy the gelding made was a slight pricking of his ears. “What we want to know is, what took you boys so long to join us?”

  Ethan twisted to share a wide-eyed glance with Daniel. “You followed us!”

  Mr. Stocking chuckled at Phizzy, who responded with a throaty gurgle. “Now how could we’a followed you if we got here first? You’d’a got here quicker going by the road, though.”

  “We weren’t in no hurry,” Daniel said woodenly.

  “Daniel was teaching me to ride,” Ethan said.

  “And a pretty sight it was, too.” Mr. Stocking lowered an eyebrow at the boys. “But how’s that mare when it comes to serious riding, huh?”

  “Serious?” Daniel repeated.

  “I mean a challenge. A race.”

  Daniel smothered a laugh. “You wouldn’t be meaning against Phizzy, now, would yo
u?”

  “Well, I don’t see no other contenders.”

  “Won’t be much of a race.”

  Mr. Stocking cocked his head, the sun blinking off his glasses into Ethan’s eyes. “Are you that sure you’ll win? Or that afraid you’ll lose?”

  “I ain’t afraid.” Daniel nudged Ethan in the small of the back. “Off with you, lad.”

  Ethan grabbed Ivy’s mane stubbornly. “But I want to ride, too.”

  Mr. Stocking waved a hand at the boys. “Oh, let your friend ride. It’ll even the odds a bit. You must admit, sir, that you have the advantage of us in age and”—Mr. Stocking patted his bulging vest—“ahem, and girth.” He scratched his chin. “Now, what’ll be the stakes?”

  “Stakes?”

  “What’d be the point in racing, son, if there wasn’t no prize at the end?” The peddler’s scratching fingers wandered from chin to ear to scalp. “Hmmmm. If you win, you can pick anything out of my goods.” He gestured toward his wagon. The winking tinware lay hidden beneath a worn canvas.

  “I got nothing to give you,” Daniel protested.

  “No matter. No matter.” Mr. Stocking glanced around the field, then snapped his fingers. “Wait. There is something. . . . If we win, let’s say you give me the loan of your mare for, oh, a quick gallop around this field . . . if she’ll have me.”

  “Oh, she’ll have you all right. It’s you having her I’d be minding.”

  Mr. Stocking shook his head. “Do you think I’d abandon three hundred dollars’ worth of goods for fifty dollars’ worth of horse? Anyway, you’re going to win, ain’t you, son?”

  “All right, then,” Daniel finally said. “One turn ’round the meadow. Will you be wanting a few seconds’ lead?”

  Mr. Stocking grinned as he shed his spencer and hat and undid his vest buttons. “Now that’s very big of you, son. Damned if you ain’t a gentleman, even if you ain’t no prince.” His round form bobbed in a bow.

  Any other time, Ethan might have giggled as he watched the little man climb onto the horse as gracelessly as a piglet clambering into a trough, but the prospect of the race made something stir inside him, like a bird gathering itself for flight.