The Secret Horses of Briar Hill(2)
“You like horses, don’t you?” she asks. Even with her cough, her voice is gentle.
I blow away the bits of crumbled eraser. I start to redraw the ear. Benny is daft if he thinks it looks like a horn.
“We had workhorses at the bakery,” I say, and add a little tuft of hair coming from its ear. “A big gelding and two bay mares. Spice, Nutmeg, and Ginger. They were beautiful. They had sandy brown hair and dark manes. They wouldn’t ever come when the bakery boys called to them, but they never ran away from me.”
“I guess horses can tell a lot about people,” Anna says.
I look up at her. Her eyebrows are knit together. It is the same look that Sister Constance gets when she goes into the kitchen pantry to take inventory of the dusty cans of ham. There are fewer and fewer of them each week.
“You must miss them terribly,” Anna adds, reaching out to brush back my hair. “I’m sure once you go home they’ll come right up to their stall doors, begging for an apple.” She starts coughing again, but pretends it’s just a tickle, and takes a sip of cold tea. “You can tell them stories about these flying horses in your drawings. Perhaps, long ago, they were cousins.”
“You like horses, don’t you?” she asks.
I stop drawing.
Anna is looking toward the window, as though something has caught her eye. When Dr. Turner told her she couldn’t leave the bed again, the Sisters pinned back a corner of the hanging wool blanket so that she could have some fresh air. In the hand mirror propped by her bedside table, there’s a flicker of movement. A winged horse is passing by in the mirror-world outside. I can catch only a glimpse of him in the reflected window. He stretches his wings like he’s been asleep all morning. Anna’s eyes jerk toward the mirror. Her eyebrows knit together again, more curiously this time.
Has she seen it?
Has she seen the winged horse?
After that first day in Sister Constance’s office, I haven’t spoken of the winged horses again—except secretly, just a little, to Anna. Everyone else snickers at me behind my back, but Anna would never do that.
And for a moment, as she studies the mirror, I think she might see the horse too.
But then she sighs, and adjusts the barrette in her hair, and flips her Young Naturalist’s Guide to Flora and Fauna open to one of the many dog-eared pages. She looks up, giving me one of her warm, soft Anna smiles. But she can’t muffle her cough with a handkerchief this time. It makes the whole bed shake.
SISTER CONSTANCE HAS MADE a new rule. It happened after Benny found one of the chickens torn apart just after breakfast. He came screaming into the kitchen with the dead bird, making its dead wings flap, shaking its dead head, sending Sister Mary Grace into the pickling room in tears. Sister Mary Grace is the youngest nun, in charge of cooking and cleaning. She’s not that much older than Anna, and Anna would cry too, if she saw a dead, bloody bird. Then Sister Constance scolded Benny and told Thomas to bury the bird in the grassy patch of land behind the barn, while she drummed on a tea tin at lunch to get our attention.
“No children are allowed beyond the kitchen terrace, on account of the foxes,” she said.
But after lunch, I sneak beyond the terrace anyway.
I want to watch Thomas bury the bird. The others are scared of him, though he is only twenty—barely a man. Benny says he is a monster. But Sister Constance says God gave Thomas only one arm for a reason, and that reason was so that he couldn’t go fight the Germans like the other young men in the village, so that he would stay here with us, in the hospital, and take care of the chickens and the sheep and the turnip patch, so that we would have vitamins to keep us strong. I know that Sister Constance can’t lie because she’s a nun, but, sometimes, I’m scared of Thomas too. Which is why I hide behind the woodpile while I watch him bury the dead chicken.
It’s the start of December, and the ground is hard, and it must be difficult for him to dig with one arm, but he manages. Where the other arm should be there is only a sleeve fastened to his shoulder with a big silver diaper pin. He lays the dead chicken in the hole. When he thinks no one is looking, he runs his fingers over the chicken’s white, white feathers, and I wonder if it feels the same on his fingers as it would on mine, if soft feathers feel the same for Benny and Anna and Sister Constance and Thomas and me, or if it’s only beneath my hands that chickens feel warm and alive, like stones left in the sun. Then Thomas buries the bird under red dirt, and the bird is gone.
DR. TURNER COMES EVERY Wednesday to administer our medication in the little room that was once a butler’s pantry. “Tell me how you are feeling, Emmaline,” he says kindly. Everything about Dr. Turner is kind. The way he warms his stethoscope before he presses it against my skin. The chocolate squares he slips me when Sister Constance isn’t looking. The wink he gives me with his woolly gray caterpillar eyebrows.
Dr. Turner is like Thomas: He isn’t whole. Only whole men can go to war to fight the Germans. But what Dr. Turner is missing isn’t an arm or a leg or even a finger. It’s a part of his heart. It’s the daughter and wife he lost to the bombs. The missing part that makes him twitch when there is a thunderstorm, and that one time, when lightning struck the roof and he crawled under the kitchen table and made a strange whining sound like a dog, until Sisters Constance and Mary Grace coaxed him out with weak tea, and sweat was soaking into the armpits of his white coat.