Mending Horses Read online

  Jonathan and Daniel walked across the yard to the pigpen, where Jonathan flung the contents of the slop bucket into the trough. The eggs broke, their sulfury odor mingling with the rank stench of pig manure. The hogs trotted up to the trough on their stubby legs and tussled noisily over the scraps.

  “Well,” Jonathan said, “I tried.”

  “You didn’t try,” Daniel said. “You didn’t mean to give her up at all. If you’d meant it, you’d’a told Mrs. Taylor she’s a girl.”

  “I promised Billy not to let her secret out. If anybody tells, it’s got to be her.”

  “That ain’t a true promise. It’s only humoring some childish fancy.”

  “Someone made you a promise when you were her age, wouldn’t you’a held ’em to it?”

  Daniel shook his head. “When I was her age, the only promises I got was for thrashings. Can’t recall as I’d’a minded were any of ’em to be broken.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Tuesday, September 10, 1839, Cabotville, Massachusetts

  Liam clasped his knees against his chest and rested his forehead on them, but he couldn’t contain the shivering. He hardly knew if he was waking or sleeping anymore, things shifted in and out so between the chills and sweats and dry heaves. Christ, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d even felt like eating, not that there was anything to eat in the shanty.

  Maybe it was all a dream, all that spring and summer since Nuala’d disappeared. Maybe if he’d just lie down for a wee bit, he’d wake up, and there she’d be, fixing dinner and telling him to stop playing sick and get off his sorry backside and fetch in some wood. And there would be Jimmy and Mick teasing and chasing each other about the room and knocking chairs over and Nuala thrashing them with her spoon and scolding and laughing all at the same time. And if it was dreaming he was after, then why not make the dream go back six years and more, and let him wake up a child again and Mam still alive and naught for him to worry about but keeping the woodbox full and keeping out of Da’s way when he was in his cups.

  I’m sorry, Mam. I’m sorry. She’d left her babies for him to care for, and he’d failed. Failed to keep them from running wild in the streets. Failed to make them go to school. Failed to keep Jimmy and Mick from turning into thieving little fiends, bringing home oranges and sweets and toys. Failed to keep his wages out of Da’s hands. Failed to keep the children out of Da’s hands, when he was in a temper from the drink. Failed to keep them safe. And in the end, failed to keep them at all. Now they were all three of them gone.

  He rocked himself and shivered. I tried, Mam, I swear I did. But with Nuala gone, it had been like the house falling down about his ears. He’d not realized how much she’d done while he was off working. There were more mysteries to housekeeping than he’d ever imagined: how to know a good cheese from a bad one, how to take butchers’ trimmings and green-grocers’ scraps and bakers’ days-old leavings and turn them into something edible, how to make it all keep more than a day. He might as well have collected stones and warmed them by the fire; they’d have come out the same as his attempts at breadmaking. He’d even spent hard-won coin on a cookery book by “A Lady,” but it could have been a book of magic spells for all he could understand of it. His attempts at laundry and mending had left the clothes looking worse than when he’d begun. And all of it to be done after he’d put in twelve hours and more with shovel and pick and wheelbarrow, digging cellar holes and canals and ditches, and him wanting to do no more than pull a blanket over his head and shut his eyes when he got home.

  He’d felt so often like the ant slaving all day while Jimmy and Mick fiddled their time away like grasshoppers. But surely the ant wouldn’t have begrudged the grasshopper his fiddling if he’d known how short the grasshopper’s season would be. He was sorry now for the times he’d thrashed them and taken away their stolen playthings. Sorry, too, that he’d shouted at them when their laughter and play kept him from sleep. How was he to know how little time they’d have for laughter? How was he to know they’d be crying for help and naught he could do but wet their foreheads while the fever burned them, naught he could do but hold them while they shivered with the chills, naught he could do but watch them while they died?

  Now that it was all over, he couldn’t even make them decent for the grave. He might as well lie next to them and pull the blanket over his own face and wait for his turn to come.

  “No,” he said, his voice a croaking whisper. For sure as hell Da wasn’t coming back, and if Liam didn’t do for them, who would? He dragged himself upright, clutching the wall as the room slipped sideways. He closed his eyes, waiting for the floor to stop pitching. When he opened them, it was like trying to see underwater, everything dim and wavering. Well, he was up; he might as well finish, never mind the clatter in his ears. Just down the alley for a bit of water and back. Five minutes’ walking any other day. Five hundred miles today. And back home again with a full bucket . . . well, that was halfway around the world. No point thinking as far as that until he’d taken those first three steps.

  One. . . . Two . . . Three.

  He gripped the doorjamb and bent to lift the bucket. Christ, you’d think it was full of rocks, so heavy it seemed. Lurching, he made his way outside, where the sunlight assaulted him like a razor blade across his eyes. He’d barely taken a dozen steps when his feet went out from under him. The last thing he heard was the faraway thud of the bucket tumbling down the road.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Wednesday, September 11, 1839, Chauncey, Connecticut

  “Where’s Billy? I should make sure this fits him.” Sophie pulled a shirt from her basket, then studied it for defects that Jonathan was sure weren’t there.

  “He’s out in the barn, probably brushing Phizzy bald. He’s been glued to that horse since I asked Daniel to join us.”

  “That’s one way he can make sure you don’t leave him behind.”

  “You’re sure you don’t want me to?”

  “If you did, he’d be off like a shot, and heaven knows where he’d end up. As long as he’s with you, at least there’s someone looking out for him.”

  Jonathan laid a hand on her shoulder. “You’d do it better, Soph. Hell, you near about brung me up.”

  “Brought,” Sophie said, shrugging off his hand.

  “Brought,” Jonathan repeated. Feeling his throat go tight, he bent to pick up the basket so he could avoid Sophie’s eyes. It was unexpectedly heavy. “What you got in here? Bricks?”

  “Books.”

  “Well, that’s mighty thoughtful of you.” He reached under the clothes and pulled a couple volumes out: grammar, geography, history, arithmetic. . . .

  “Those boys need proper lessons.”

  “I ain’t no schoolmaster, cousin.” Jonathan emphasized the ain’t. “I can’t even talk—”

  “Not can’t. Don’t. I know perfectly well what you can and cannot do. You’ve been a dancing master, a singing master, an actor.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “So?”

  “So, act like a schoolmaster.” She folded her arms under her bosom. “Give them proper lessons and set them an example. None of your ain’ts or brungs.”

  “Maybe I ought’a leave Billy behind after all. The two of you are sure matched for stubbornness.”

  “Will you be back for Thanksgiving?” she asked.

  Jonathan leaned over and gently kissed her cheek. “Cousin, the devil himself couldn’t keep me away from one of your Thanksgiving dinners. I can already feel my mouth watering.” He stood back, pleased that he’d coaxed a sparkle into her eyes. “Come November, being on the road’ll lose its charm,” he said. “Once Billy sees a little snow flying, he’ll want to settle.”

  She reached out and straightened his collar. “You never did.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Wednesday, September 11, 1839, Springfield, Massachusetts

  “They’re all of ’em dead, Hugh?” Eamon asked.

  Hugh started with the weight of his cousin�
�s hand on his shoulder. He nodded, turned mute by a burning feeling in his chest, his ribs like a cage of hot iron bars squeezing ever tighter around his lungs and heart. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t close his eyes without seeing Liam’s gaunt and wasted face, Death standing at his side as near as Hugh stood to Eamon just now. He blinked, surprised to see Eamon’s ruddy, weathered features instead of Liam’s, to hear the murmur of the men in the tavern instead of Liam’s labored breath. “Christ, me lads,” he moaned, scrubbing at his face with clammy palms.

  “Here, man, a wee bit of something to settle you, eh?” Eamon pressed a tumbler into Hugh’s trembling hand.

  The rum went down sharp, a sting at the back of his throat. “Thanks, Eamon. You’re a good man,” he said, his voice raspy from the weeping he’d done on the long trek from Cabotville. With the second glass, the burning around his heart subsided into a dull ache.

  He drew in the good healthy odors of wood smoke and cooking and tobacco, the sweat of working men and the animal smells that lingered on their shoes and clothes. He filled his pipe with trembling hands, hoping the sweet tobacco smoke would purge the stench of vomit and feces, disease and decay from his nostrils.

  “ ’Tis a hard life, that it is,” Eamon commiserated, “and naught but suffering for our lot. You shouldn’t’a had to bury ’em all on your own.”

  Hugh’s face flushed with shame. No need to tell the man that he’d had no heart to stay for the burying—no heart to stay and see Liam’s corpse added to the two lads under the blanket. What good would it have done to watch Liam’s life slip away like water through his fingers, just as Margaret’s and Jimmy’s and Mick’s had? His heart was never meant to take such sorrow. So he’d turned his back and put one foot in front of the other, hoping that the farther away he got, the lighter his burden would grow. Only it hadn’t worked that way, and he’d found himself at Eamon’s door with his insides turned leaden and an invisible chain shackling him to the memory of the room reeking of sickness.

  “Another, cousin?” Eamon asked.

  “Aye,” Hugh said, though he feared there’d not be drink enough in the world to wash his soul clean.

  Thursday, September 12, 1839, Cabotville, Massachusetts

  How had he managed to stay alive? Liam wondered. Or, rather, who had helped him? Whose hands had laid cool damp cloths across his forehead when he burned and piled blankets on him when he froze and trickled water onto his parched lips? The puzzle wove through his fever-blistered dreams. Sometimes he fancied it was Da, come back to salvage his first and last child. Sometimes it was Nuala. And sometimes it was Mam, and himself but a child and everything the way it had been before it had all gone irretrievably wrong.

  He kept his eyes closed, not wanting to let go the feeling that Mam was with him somehow. But eventually the clatter of fireplace tools and pots became too real to shut out. A savory aroma set his stomach yearning. For the first time in he didn’t know how many days, he was hungry.

  He opened one eye a wee bit. He lay on the floor in the corner of a shanty cobbled together of building scraps, much like his own. But it wasn’t his own; from the wooden floor to the whitewashed walls, the battered table and cupboard to the dishes on the shelves, it was all wrong. And there was something very wrong about the woman in the blue dress and brown-checked apron bending over a kettle on the hearth.

  It took him a hard minute of thinking to place her, though she lived in the shanty across from his. He’d always turned aside when their paths crossed, avoided meeting her eyes, for who’d be wanting anything to do with such a woman? She lived on her own, earning her livelihood taking in laundry and sewing, though most said she took in more than that. One of the neighbor ladies said she’d go out in the evenings, coming back to her shanty with a different man each time.

  She had a weary sort of prettiness about her, grayish smudges of sleeplessness under her eyes, making their color seem brighter and her lashes longer and darker. Most brown-eyed lasses, you’d not notice the color of their eyes from across a room, but this one’s were a clear amber, like a pair of ear bobs Mam had once admired in a store. Her brown hair was pulled back in a careless knot, a stray tendril curling limply against her cheek. Some might call that wanton. To him, she just looked careworn, too short of time or money to bother with braids and sidecombs and caps.

  He realized that she was saying something. He turned so his good ear was toward her. It hurt to move even that much. Everything ached, like waking up after a thrashing from Da, only the ache went deeper and fiercer than any he’d felt before.

  She knelt on the floor next to him. She was younger than he’d expected, perhaps not much over twenty. “Are you awake for real this time?” she asked.

  “I—I hardly know,” he mumbled. He flinched from her hand on his forehead. “What am I doing here?”

  “Not dying, apparently,” she said.

  “But—but why?” Gingerly, he dragged himself into a sitting position. She helped him shift the bolster and pillow behind his back so he could lean against the wall. He closed his eyes to rest from the exertion.

  “Because I’m such a good doctor, I suppose.”

  He opened one eye. Was she smiling? “Please, miss. Me head’s too sore for riddling. Can you just tell me plain what happened? How did I get here?”

  “You were lying in my doorway. Can’t have young men dying in the street. It’s bad for business.” She went back to her kettles, poured out a mug of some sort of tea, tasted it, and made a sour face. She chiseled a lump from a sugar loaf and dropped it in the mug. “I tried to have someone carry you home, but when I looked inside—”

  “Jesus, me house.” He tried to shove the blankets aside and get up, but they tangled like snakes around his legs, and his effort to wrestle them off only made him dizzy. The woman came back and held him still with hardly any effort.

  “It’s all right, Liam. They’re . . . taken care of. They were all you talked of while you were feverish. So I had them made decent, and your shanty cleaned.”

  “But you don’t even know me.”

  “I’ve been here three years. I certainly know my neighbors by now.” She got up and went back to her tea. “Even though they wouldn’t care to know me.”

  He looked away and picked at an unraveling thread on the coarse woolen blanket. The only thing he knew about her, besides how she made her living, was that her speech marked her for a Yankee. What other sort of Yankee woman would be reduced to living in the Patch among the Paddies?

  She returned to his side, offering him a mug of tea. “For the headache,” she said.

  It was some sort of concoction of herbs that would have tasted foul even with a gill of sugar dumped into it. He tried to swallow it without grimacing.

  “I know,” she said. “It tastes horrid. Drink it anyway.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “All you done, and I don’t even know you.” He took another sip of the bitter liquid to show he appreciated her efforts.

  He nearly choked on the tea when she replied, “I’m a whore, just as you thought.”

  “It’s not me who ought to be judging folk,” he said. “With me da a drunk and me—” A what? Nothing was the only word that came into his head. “But even a—someone like yourself has got a name.”

  “Augusta,” she said.

  “Augusta?” he repeated. “It sounds a bit—” He swallowed back what he’d meant to say, which was that it sounded a bit grand for a whore. Instead he said, “It sounds too harsh to suit you.” Neither did she look like a whore—not that he’d be knowing. She looked just a bit on the nicer side of ordinary.

  “Augusta,” he said, “What if you took sick yourself?”

  She shrugged. “It’s not as if anyone would miss me. Besides, I thought your father might come back for you.” She got up and turned back to the fireplace. “I should have known better.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She took a pair of bowls down from a shelf and began ladling so
me sort of soup into them. She was careful to put mostly broth into one bowl. “It’s hard not to hear your neighbors fighting when the houses are practically on top of each other. It’s hard to miss when someone’s cursing or quarreling. Or being beaten. At least now you’re finally grown enough to fight back.”

  Finally? Warmth crept up his neck. It rankled him that she’d consider him no more than a boy.

  Augusta gave him the bowl of broth and sat on the floor next to him to eat her own soup. He let the first spoonful linger on his tongue before it slid down his throat like a caress. “My God, that’s good,” he said.

  Augusta’s mouth pursed as though she were trying not to laugh. “It’s only broth.”

  “Aye, well, you’ve not had me cooking, have you?” he said. “Thank you. For everything.” He nodded toward the door. “And for whatever you done over there.”

  She looked away uneasily. “It wasn’t exactly my doing. I hired somebody.”

  His own stomach turned at the thought of clearing out the foul mess that illness and death had left behind. “Wouldn’t folk be afraid of the fever and all?”

  “There’s always someone who’s willing to do what you won’t for the right price.”

  “I’ll pay you back. Whatever it cost you.”

  She fidgeted with her spoon. “Well, actually, you already have paid.”

  “With what?” He’d a little money hidden away, but surely not enough.

  “For someone with nothing, a pot or a chair is as good as money. Your rooms are clean, but you’ll find them emptier than you left them.” She got up and set her bowl on the table, then busied herself with tending to the fire. “And they had to burn the bedding.”