Read Online Things as They Are by Guy Vanderhaeghe - Free Book Online
Authors: Guy Vanderhaeghe
Tags: Literary, Literature & Fiction, Short Stories, Literary Fiction, Short Stories & Anthologies, Single Authors
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spring wind. He is enjoying the warmth, the returning sap of life, when a nagging disquiet surfaces to spoil his pleasure. There is something important he meant to do, has forgotten. Then he remembers. Last fall he’d failed to bring the horses in from the pasture, they have spent the entire winter out, endured blizzards and bitter cold without food and shelter.
The horses are waiting for him at the gate, where they have waited all winter. Skeletons with ribs like barrel hoops under the long matted hair of their winter coats, feeble legs with swollen knees bulging like coconuts, cracked hooves planted in the cold trampled mud, pleading necks stretched across the barbed wire, dull eyes staring.
Joseph tells his father that dreams like this are common, mean nothing. Yet in the last hours of semi-consciousness, in the delirious prelude to death, his father makes him promise,again and again, that he will save the winter horses. “Save the winter horses,” is his last appeal, to anyone. “Save the winter horses,” he beseeches.
Nine months after his father’s death when it is late at night, very late at night, and Joseph is sitting in his study supposedly working on his fictitious article about Charles Maurras and the Action Française but really reading books on horses, he locates a memory, or a memory locates him. The yellow lamplight loses its harshness, softens and deepens, signalling this is a memory situated in late afternoon, sometime around the supper hour. He is a small boy riding with his father, tucked behind the saddle horn in the way not so long ago his father used to carry Andrew, half-hypnotized by the horse’s head nodding up and down against the sky in the regular rhythm of a metronome, tick tock, tick tock, lulled by the rolling gait. Full of a child’s floating torpor, he is adrift, the tired, fumble-footed shamble of the horse rocking him, rocking him, his heavy-lidded eyes blearing the long grass rippling around him in a vibrant smear of endless green. The heat of the sun burns on his face and chest, the horse burns beneath him, the curve of his father’s belly burns on his back. Golden, burning, he is carried off in what direction, where, he doesn’t know. In his child’s heart this journey is forever, this hour is a day, this day a week, this week a month, this is infinite, this is everything. He falls back against his father and he sleeps.
In Christian art the horse is held to represent courage and generosity. It is the companion of St. Martin, St. Maurice, St. George, and St. Victor, all of whom are pictured on horseback. In the catacombs it was, with the fish and the cross, a common symbol. No one is absolutely certain what its meaning was, although it is assumed it represents the swift, fleeting, and transitory character of life
.
The Master of Disaster
THE SUMMER OF 1968. Norman Hiller and Kurt Meinecke, both dreamers, and me caught sticky between them, the jam in the sandwich. Norman was the flashy type, the guy who collected followers, collected them the way he did baseball cards and Superman comic books. I was seventeen the summer he collected Meinecke, old enough to have said something, to have warned my mild and innocent friend, but I didn’t.
Kurt Meinecke and I had one more year of high school left, we were going back to the books in September. Norman Hiller, in a manner of speaking, was already done. In June of that year Principal Koslowski had handed him the grade-ten diploma he hadn’t earned on the promise that Hiller would never again darken the classrooms and corridors of R.J. Plumber High. Which made Norman Hiller the Seventh Wonder of the World. Nobody but Norman would have dared to make such a larcenous proposal to old Cougar Koslowski. What’s more, he drove the bargain through. Whenever any one of us asked him what he intended to do now, all he said was, “I got some irons in the fire. I’m waiting on developments.”
Of the two of them, Norman and Kurt,
The horses are waiting for him at the gate, where they have waited all winter. Skeletons with ribs like barrel hoops under the long matted hair of their winter coats, feeble legs with swollen knees bulging like coconuts, cracked hooves planted in the cold trampled mud, pleading necks stretched across the barbed wire, dull eyes staring.
Joseph tells his father that dreams like this are common, mean nothing. Yet in the last hours of semi-consciousness, in the delirious prelude to death, his father makes him promise,again and again, that he will save the winter horses. “Save the winter horses,” is his last appeal, to anyone. “Save the winter horses,” he beseeches.
Nine months after his father’s death when it is late at night, very late at night, and Joseph is sitting in his study supposedly working on his fictitious article about Charles Maurras and the Action Française but really reading books on horses, he locates a memory, or a memory locates him. The yellow lamplight loses its harshness, softens and deepens, signalling this is a memory situated in late afternoon, sometime around the supper hour. He is a small boy riding with his father, tucked behind the saddle horn in the way not so long ago his father used to carry Andrew, half-hypnotized by the horse’s head nodding up and down against the sky in the regular rhythm of a metronome, tick tock, tick tock, lulled by the rolling gait. Full of a child’s floating torpor, he is adrift, the tired, fumble-footed shamble of the horse rocking him, rocking him, his heavy-lidded eyes blearing the long grass rippling around him in a vibrant smear of endless green. The heat of the sun burns on his face and chest, the horse burns beneath him, the curve of his father’s belly burns on his back. Golden, burning, he is carried off in what direction, where, he doesn’t know. In his child’s heart this journey is forever, this hour is a day, this day a week, this week a month, this is infinite, this is everything. He falls back against his father and he sleeps.
In Christian art the horse is held to represent courage and generosity. It is the companion of St. Martin, St. Maurice, St. George, and St. Victor, all of whom are pictured on horseback. In the catacombs it was, with the fish and the cross, a common symbol. No one is absolutely certain what its meaning was, although it is assumed it represents the swift, fleeting, and transitory character of life
.
The Master of Disaster
THE SUMMER OF 1968. Norman Hiller and Kurt Meinecke, both dreamers, and me caught sticky between them, the jam in the sandwich. Norman was the flashy type, the guy who collected followers, collected them the way he did baseball cards and Superman comic books. I was seventeen the summer he collected Meinecke, old enough to have said something, to have warned my mild and innocent friend, but I didn’t.
Kurt Meinecke and I had one more year of high school left, we were going back to the books in September. Norman Hiller, in a manner of speaking, was already done. In June of that year Principal Koslowski had handed him the grade-ten diploma he hadn’t earned on the promise that Hiller would never again darken the classrooms and corridors of R.J. Plumber High. Which made Norman Hiller the Seventh Wonder of the World. Nobody but Norman would have dared to make such a larcenous proposal to old Cougar Koslowski. What’s more, he drove the bargain through. Whenever any one of us asked him what he intended to do now, all he said was, “I got some irons in the fire. I’m waiting on developments.”
Of the two of them, Norman and Kurt,
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