Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

I was holding the paperback book when Anya came in to find me sitting on her bed. The noise of the vacuum cleaner broke around me like beach thunder. Her throat was slack now, and the flesh of her upper arms soft. In her black dressing gown she seemed pretentious and pathetic, too made up, as if she had costumed herself for solitude and, at the same time, me.

She turned her head to the side as she looked at me; it was a dog’s motion of puzzlement, a gesture new for her, another sign of age in us both. She asked me, I think, what the matter was. But her voice did not carry through the sound of the machine.

That was when I whispered, into all that mechanical rage, to all her worn-out loneliness, that I’d been studying too hard and needed to rest. I thought of Leonard Marcus’ wife and tried to picture her as short.

That was when Anya mimed across the machine to me the question I read on her lips.

She said: What? What?

IAN’S GRANDFATHER summoned him with sneezes. Bright silver light from the leaded windows behind his grandfather made the dust a steady snow, falling from nowhere onto the old man’s shoulders and the polished wood desk. Large in the morning light, he sat under an avalanche of shiny fineness, always being buried where he sat — slow storms of dust fell over him into his shadow on the smooth golden oak, disappearing — always untouched. From the doorway the old man was magical, and Ian watched as his grandfather crossed his arms and held himself by the shoulders and squeezed at the brown tweed cloth he wore and hunched his shoulders and pushed his chin down onto his chest and shuddered and closed his eyes and shook out the sneeze with an open-mouthed roar. He wiped the coarse sleeve across his mouth and nose — the left arm now hugged his heart — and like a cat licking fur, he rubbed the same sleeve on the desk, slowly back and forth, cleaning. When he saw Ian in the doorway, a little higher than the sculpted metal knob, the old man said, “What? What? ” and Ian blew away.

IAN’S MOTHER WAS changing Stuart’s diaper — here they called it nappy, but his mother said it smelled the same in England as it did in America — and Ian stood in his room and looked around the corner of the high cupboard that, with a dark green curtain, divided where he slept from the smaller room where his mother and Stuart had a double bed and a crib. He watched as she rolled Stuart over and swabbed him with a wash rag, then turned him over again to poke him in the stomach.

Ian held himself and watched. Then he stopped smiling and backed away in his high black Wellingtons and his tight American jeans and went down the wooden steps into the main room, where they had their little kitchen and their dining table and couch and the fire that smoked. There were wooden beams on the low white ceiling, and dark chunks of wood floated in the white plaster walls. Ian stood in the room and they laughed upstairs. He took an apple down from the little refrigerator top and the sharp knife from the table. He sliced the apple, then took bread from the cupboard and made two sandwiches — chunks of thick-skinned apple between slices of bread. He put them on the wide white plates and carried them up the steps. At the doorway to his room he called, “It’s okay, Mom, I got breakfast for us. The baby can wait for his. I got us our breakfast first because we’re bigger.”

BRENDA WAS in the field with the six horses, spreading hay from two bales in a wheelbarrow that she had slid, squeaking, from the old stables next door to the stone coalhouse and the little stone cottage where Ian and his mother and Stuart were staying. Next to their cottage was the big house, with its chimneys at either end. The grandfather stood in front of his house, looking down the walk and over the yew hedge and the stone fence to where Brenda, small and skinny in her dark green duffel coat and jeans and Wellingtons, fed the horses in the rain. He saw what the boy saw — a pony trying to enter the white and black mare.

Ian, in his yellow slicker and hat, sitting under the overturned canvas-and-tubing sun chaise, called, “He’s putting a baby into her, Grampa. We’ll have puppies soon, won’t we?” The mare kicked away at the pony.

High in his dark tweed sportcoat, rocking on his shoes with their built-up commando soles, the grandfather looked at the boy, and ran his big hand over his pink scalp and the black and white strands that crossed over it. “Puppies,” he said. “Ian, when horses have babies, they’re called foals . Foals, lad. Can you say that?”

Ian said, “Foals.”

His grandfather watched Brenda stand in the circle of mud and manure while the horses and ponies ate at the six stations of hay she’d made. At some signal no one ever saw, one horse would think of changing his station and another would respond, moving from his so that the first one could move, and then they all would move, in a slow rainy dance, while Brenda stood there in the center.

“Brenda’s good,” the grandfather said.

Ian’s mother came up from the cottage, carrying Stuart, both of them covered by the white canvas raincoat she held like a tent. She said, “Brenda’s got a crooked nose.”

His grandfather said, “Got it the good way — she was twice kicked, had it broken twice, never set, never in hospital for it. She’s as tough as you. She’s tougher.”

“She’s twenty-five years old, Daddy.”

“Aye, all of that. She qualifies, all right.”

His mother said, “For what? ”

His grandfather hugged his chest and ducked his face and wrenched his mouth about and let the sneeze curl out of his mouth and nose. He wiped his face with his sleeve.

Stuart said, “Toooo!”

His mother said, “Punishment.”

His grandfather said, “Dinner,” and went inside.

BRENDA WAS wearing a black halter and her dungarees and boots, and a scarf held her long brown hair in place behind her, on the neck. She rode out with three pony-trekkers shifting and wobbling like potato sacks on their thin saddles. She led them across the two-lane road and up a small access road that went to the foot of the fells. She waved to Ian. She had dropped the butt of her filtered cigarette on the dust and stones inside the green metal gate Ian closed for her, then stood on, climbing the rungs, waving back.

When Ian jumped off the gate, the morning sun was high and hot. Sheep across the road moaned, and a truck coming down the 1:7 hill from the quarry at Broughton Moor filled the fields with the sound of its straining. The boy turned and saw that the small herd of two-year-old cattle in the outer field had followed him, were standing in a semicircle behind him, heads lowered, watching. As he moved, a white and gray heifer jumped backward and threw its face up.

“Hello,” the boy said. “Hello.” Ian held a handful of weed up to them and said, “Hello.”

All their eyes watched.

IAN’S MOTHER lay on the sun chaise in a bathing suit that was held together at the stomach by a metal ring. Her eyes were closed and her face was covered with tiny drops of oiled sweat. Her toes danced to the music from Brenda’s big brown radio which sat atop a stone wall, all that was left of a shed outside the old stables. Brenda rubbed oil onto tack, and Ian’s mother lay with almost a smile on her face, moving her feet. Stuart sat on the cobbles near Brenda, holding a red and white ball against his face, watching Brenda’s hands move. Ian, in Wellingtons and shorts, made a tiny house of stones and twigs. Everyone was quiet, and the radio played, and then the green metal gate two pastures down squeaked above the music and Brenda, without looking, said, “Oh, it must be another gifted horseman. I suppose I shall have to book the lot of rubbish for a ride.”