The Baker's Secret(17)
DuFour arrived instead, nose running, shoes and pant legs wet from hurrying through drenched fields. In one hand he held an umbrella, half of its ribs inverted. In the other he carried a satchel of bandages and salves.
“This animal needs no ointment,” Pierre lamented. “You must end her misery.”
The farmer tried to lead his horse from the path into the open. Neptune gimped and squealed, tossing her head until he relented.
“Perhaps I can heal her,” DuFour told Pierre.
“Perhaps I can fly like a crow,” the old man responded. “She has a broken leg. Do what you must, I prefer not to watch.”
Pierre hobbled back toward his house, bent with grief. It was a slow and quiet walk across two wheat fields, which gave him time to think about his other draft horse. Apollo and Neptune had pulled beside one another, cutter and tedder and plow, for fifteen years. As Pierre’s strength had dwindled over time, and the land he farmed therefore diminished, those two animals made his life possible. He had not needed to steer them at the plow in years, for example. They knew when to turn and how to follow the previous row.
But one horse? Worthless. Apollo would eat and require medicine, he would wallow and sicken and resist, the whole time missing his work twin, imbalanced as if a leg had been amputated, not trained to work by himself, not strong enough to pull alone. And in wartime the odds of finding, much less affording, a partner horse were as low as a repeat of the miracle of fishes and loaves.
There was, too, the inescapable reality of age. That winter Pierre had been unable to draw the wood-splitting ax higher than his shoulder. It was as clear a signal as the bell ringing in the spire of St. Agnes by the Sea: he simply did not possess enough remaining life to train a new animal. Neptune’s mishap aside, a draft horse typically lived beyond twenty years. The farmer knew he himself would be lucky to survive another five, and that was without considering the effects of the occupation, which were unlikely to lengthen the count of anyone’s days.
Pierre approached the barnyard across from his tiny stone house. Sorrow over Neptune pierced him. He imagined an identical pain would afflict Apollo once he came to understand what had happened—and do not tell a farmer that animals do not comprehend death; they know it as fully as any human, and often mourn with greater dignity.
Now Apollo stood before him, a deep-breathing giant. The horse scratched his flank on the fence, which leaned from his weight, then he ambled nearer to be petted.
“Funny thing, Neptune getting in this scrape,” Pierre told him, scratching along the horse’s mane, under his massive jaw. “You were always the one who wandered.”
The last of the thunder rumbled from the east, and an idea came to him. The very notion gave him a sense of relief. Biting down on his pipe, Pierre slipped the loop of rope off a fence post and opened the gate. And that was that. He turned away, leaving the gate wide.
At first the enormous animal did not move. Pierre took his sadness and shuffled into the house, closing the door quietly. That way he would not hear the pistol shot for Neptune. What an admission for a man, to acknowledge that his days of horses are done. His mother, rest her soul, had often made a point of telling people that he had learned to walk by holding a mare’s tail for balance. Now, at long last, the time had come to let that tail go.
Apollo ventured two steps out of the corral, turning his huge head to survey in all directions, before crossing the dooryard to a temptation he had desired countless times from inside the fence: Pierre’s herb garden, which flourished behind a circle of small rocks. Rosemary, lavender, thyme, all sweeter than ordinary grass. Bending his long neck, and with dainty bites, Apollo began to eat.
Back in the hedgerow, DuFour could not bring himself to finish the animal. It was like felling a tree: in which direction would Neptune tip? Probably into the path, blocking the way. And what was he to do with the carcass? He had no idea. Taking out the pistol, he opened it and loaded the chambers. Then, reasoning that he would only need one round, he unloaded it completely. Over the hours he repeated these actions several times while rain dripped from the leaves and a pair of finches chased one another down the path. The horse whimpered and shook. DuFour marched off, stopping a few hundred steps away before returning to stand beside Neptune. She had closed her eyes, holding her broken leg bent at the knee.
As the sun set, still DuFour had not acted. When night fell and no one could see, he took his broken umbrella and went home, returning at dawn to find the horse still there, of course, still suffering, of course. Traffic along that hedgerow was nil, such that no one came along to share DuFour’s hesitation, to commiserate, to buck up his courage or help him do the job.
Neptune had drawn within herself, silent and unmoving, as fixed as a commandment, and DuFour began to hate the horse for its predicament. The torment continued for two full days, the veterinarian’s assistant keeping vigil without taking action, until the blue bicycle returned.
“Where have you been?” DuFour demanded as the veterinarian pedaled up the lane. “It has been an agony here.”
“Did I not leave you with my gun?” he replied.
“Here it is, the vile thing.” DuFour held out the pistol. “I did not know what to do. You told me not to treat anything.”
Guillaume ran his gaze along the horse, her lowered head, the broken leg now drawn high against her haunch. He murmured to Neptune, then turned to speak through clenched teeth. “You are no longer my apprentice.”