Ширли Мерфи - The Sand Ponies

“Us?”

“There’s more. There’s Lisa. We’re twins.” The child turns, looking over her shoulder. Coming from a spot out of sight against the cliff is a second child, exactly like the first, and just as dirty. The crow screams loudly.

Now there are two muddy urchins. They put out two grubby hands. Karen takes Jana’s, Tom, Lisa’s. They start to walk down the beach.

“You don’t live anywhere,” says Lisa. It is not a question.

“Not now,” Karen says. I must be bemused, she thinks. What’s the matter with me?

“You will live with us,” says Lisa matter-of-factly.

When they have skirted odd fields and crossed another stream and have walked through the fragrant twilight of a redwood grove and have waded a larger, deeper stream, there, in a field of tall grass, sits an ancient barn, silvered by the sea wind. It has no house, no fences—there is no sign of life at all.

A shaft of sunlight cuts across the open barn door, making a spider web glitter. A moment later, a spry, gray-haired person steps out into the sunlight wiping her hands on a ragged apron. A lop-eared hound comes out behind her, and the smell of ginger cookies floats out with her like a cloud. There is no house to hold a kitchen, but ginger cakes are cooking somewhere, and the crow has come to sit on the roof of the barn. A willow tree stands in the yard.

“Sarah, Sarah, Sarah.” The little girls let go of hands and run madly ahead. “Sarah, look what we found!” they both shout.

There she stands in the sunlight, wiping her hands and watching the children come across the field, her blue eyes bright. There is Sarah Paddyfoot, and she looks like someone you might have known forever.

But let us go back a minute, before we go ahead.

It is a frosty, blue-hazed morning, early in the spring, about the time that Kippy began to yearn for home. The crow sits on a dead bush near the barn, watching for mice in the white stubble of the field. But something is amiss. There is something strange in the air, and he flies up toward heaven, where he can see the land below.

What is this? Across the field comes a figure, stepping starchily in the frozen grass. Across the fields she comes walking, gray hair a straggle, old brown skirt awry, old blue tennis shoes scrunching in the frozen stubble. Blue eyes sparkling, nose pink from the cold, she covers the fields with the stride of a girl, swinging her satchel and looking up at the crow, who caws at her, telling her she is trespassing.

“Hush, you crow!” says Sarah Paddyfoot. “I have come to stay. You’d better get used to me, sir! I haven’t found a place yet, but I will, and you’d better treat me kindly!”

No one will ever know why Sarah Paddyfoot turned and crossed the fields to the old barn. Nothing could have been more unlikely, for someone wanting work. There were nice houses in the village farther north, and certainly she could see their roofs tucked among the hills, and the inviting whiffs of smoke from their chimneys. But across the fields to the barn she went.

One might go there to steal a little firewood, or to look for relics, or to offer charity if one saw a sign of life. Or one might go looking for a lost dog, or a stray cow. But to go there for a job? No, never.

But Sarah Paddyfoot came, moving jauntily across the fields, arguing with the crow. Jana and Lisa watched her come, two small faces peering from the loft of the barn. Bo watched her come, growling softly and wagging his tail. John watched her come, from where he was washing by the stream, and Mr. Tillman watched her come from where he was planing boards inside the barn.

There are four Tillmans—five, counting Bo—and every one watched Sarah Paddyfoot come across the fields and set her satchel down by the barn door and look around her, at the old barn, at the little pile of new lumber inside, at the Tillmans, and at old Bo and the crow.

She never went away again; a motherless house needs someone, and Sarah Paddyfoot had come to stay. One more plate for supper; one more bed in the barn.

And now, led home like stray calves, a grubby twin guiding each, come Karen and Tom.

Two more plates for supper; two more beds in the barn.

Sarah Paddyfoot gives them milk and ginger cakes and sends the dirty twins to wash themselves. “Together, we call them J.L.,” says Sarah Paddyfoot. “Separate, they are Jana and Lisa, but together they are J.L. Together,” continues Sarah Paddyfoot, “they are something more than two little girls; something like a swarm. Or a plague.” She pours more milk for the children.

CHAPTER 10

It is a tall barn, with a loft above, full height, and there is a proper stairway leading up, and a railing around the loft where it looks down into the barn below.

In five of the stalls below there are five cots made of hay, and in one huge stall, near the open barn door, where the ginger-cookie smell is heaviest, there is the skeleton of a kitchen: rough walls, little old stove standing alone, sink set into a cabinet of many colors as if it were put together from many bits and pieces—but well put together, Tom notices, straight and true. There are apple boxes for cupboards, but also a light frame of new lumber where someone has started to make cabinets, and this, too, is no amateur job. Tom looks questioningly at Sarah Paddyfoot, taking more cookies from the oven. “Not me,” she says. “I’m no carpenter. Mr. Tillman did that.”

The window is still just a square hole, hut big, letting in the morning and a branch or two of the willow tree as well.

“John and Mr. Tillman are in town,” says Sarah, “taking apart an old house for lumber and such.

Plumbing, too! Have us a real bathroom soon, good hot shower. Water pipes already in,” she says, indicating the sink. “Could use some help, that man could,” she says, looking at Tom. “John’s mighty fine help, all right, learning real good, but the more hands the better, for this work.” She lifts the last cookies off the tin and sets them to cool in a cupboard, closing the door securely and glancing out the window at the crow, who is sitting in the willow tree peering at her. “Old robber!” she mutters. “Come on, kids, you can pick out your rooms.” She chuckles. “Have a bucket to wash in if you like, then come on with J.L. and me to get some clams for supper.”

The shore can be seen from the barn door, white dunes sloping gently down to it, patches of tall russet grass making patterns in the wind. The beach itself is wide and wet, for the tide is out, and the clams, dug deep and fast or lost, are plentiful and good sized. In the distance a dark, heavy rain cloud lies over the sea. The sand is bare of footprints, save their own and the little forked ones of the shore birds. Bo goes to play in the water, frolicking like a pup, and far out beyond the breakers a seal watches them, watches Bo playing there. Gulls cry overhead, the surf pounds and foams, and the crow comes out of the sky to scold them.

“There is every kind of bird track,” Karen says, “but no animal prints.”

“You’ll see animals one morning, see coon and possum,” says Sarah Paddyfoot, plopping a big clam into her bucket. “Be Sand Ponies looking in your window one morning if you’re good to them.”

Karen looks startled, then laughs.

“Think not?” says Sarah Paddyfoot. “Wild they are, but you put grain out, don’t scare ‘em, you’ll see!”

“That’s true,” shouts Jana. “That’s really true. They come to the door at night, sometimes, look right in. Only for the grain, though,” she adds. “Must be very still when they come. They’re really fairy ponies.”

Sarah smiles.

“Where did they come from, Sarah?” Karen asks.

“Well, some say they are the ghosts of children who would not leave the seashore,” Sarah says, grinning. “Some say they’re wards of the devil, sent to plague us. Some think they’re fairies,” she says, glancing at J.L. “That you can wish on them. Who knows, for sure? Not I,” she says with a twinkle in her eye. “Were here when I came, here when the Tillmans came before me. Be here when we’re all gone, dare say.”