Guy Vanderhaeghe - The Englishman’s Boy

Fine Man could hear Broken Horn stirring restlessly behind him. Horn was an impatient, proud man, and he was eager to ride to the band and tell the story of how they had lifted these horses from under the noses of the white men, to hear the acclaim of the people, and eat the fat pup which his Sits-Beside-Him wife would cook to welcome him home. Only the cannons of the blue horse’s hind legs needed to be done, but Fine Man did not hurry, he worked on attentively, with precision. Then, when he was finished, he stood and signalled to Horn it was time to go.

They rode out, Fine Man on a paint horse and Broken Horn on a sorrel he had picked because it was the colour of the white man’s new penny. Each man managed a string of eight ponies, the tail of the horse he led knotted to the halter shank of the horse that followed, its tail knotted in turn to the shank of the horse behind it, and so on. The sun was bright and sweet on the skin, but Broken Horn couldn’t stop watching the blue horse running beside them, anxious it might escape in the last moments of the long journey. But the winter horse only trotted a short way off, nickering to his brothers and they nickering back. For two miles they rode in this fashion before glimpsing the teepees of Chief Talking Bird’s camp. So close to the promise of home, Broken Horn could not contain his excitement and broke into the lead, swinging his file of ponies back and forth in the zigzag by which an Assiniboine party announced a successful raid. A boy on the outskirts of the camp spotted him and ran back to the village calling out their names to the people. Hearing this proclamation, Broken Horn urged his string of horses into a gallop, cracking the line from side to side so that the dust boiled up under their hooves in a cloud which, lit by the sun, glowed in celebration of their arrival.

People began to spill from the camp, shouting; dogs barked and howled while children laughed and galloped in zigzags like Broken Horn and his horses. Fine Man smiled and held his ponies to a trot, the blue horse close, snowflakes gleaming. The sun was a hot blanket across his shoulder and his feet jogged up and down in time with the life of the horse which bore him. Broken Horn had halted now and Fine Man could see the people crowding in to praise the ponies’ beauty and strength, crowding in to caress them. A little way back from the crowd he could see his Sits-Beside-Him wife holding the little one in her arms, and his second wife, her sister, waiting to greet him.

He was very near now, his heart big in his breast with pride as the blue horse flew into the surprised eyes of the people, moving like a snow squall too strong for the hot sun to melt. When he reined in behind Broken Horn, the winter horse did not hesitate, but kept moving, head carried high, ears pricked as he trotted by all those who had fallen into silence, awed by the picture he made. Even the jaws of the snarling, snapping dogs snapped shut at the sight of the horse pushing into the ring of teepees, a blizzard with a purpose, hooves sure and certain as they skirted cooking fires.

Then Fine Man understood his power-dream, completely, perfectly, understood why the winter horse had summoned him across all those miles to come to him, understood who it was the horse had wished to give himself to from the beginning.

The drum of the Mystery World, the drum of this world, of the sky, of the earth, of his wives and his child, was beating, swelling in him, throbbing wildly against his breastbone, filling Fine Man with happiness. Sitting his horse, he began to sing a song of praise for the man to whom the winter horse was giving himself.

The faces of the people bobbed up in astonishment and the sun bowed down when he sang the name of the great holy man, the man who lived now for the sake of the grandchildren. Between the lodges Fine Man could see the horse moving like a storm readying to empty itself, blowing from lodge to lodge, searching while he sang.

Then the blue horse stopped. And Fine Man did too.

The works I consulted while writing this novel are too numerous to cite, but I would like to make particular mention of several. Paul Sharp’s Whoop-Up Country: The Canadian-American West, 1865-188 5 (University of Minnesota Press, 1955); Wallace Stegner’s Wolf Willow (The Viking Press, 1962); James Willard Schultz’s My Life as an Indian (Beaufort Books, 1983); and articles in the Montana Magazine of History: Jay Mack Gamble’s “Up River to Benton,” and Hugh A. Dempsey’s “Cypress Hills Massacre” and “Sweetgrass Hills Massacre.”

I would also like to acknowledge Richard Schickel’s D.W. Griffith: An American Life (Simon and Schuster, 1984); Frances Marion’s Off With Their Heads!: A Serio-comic Tale of Hollywood (Macmillan, 1972); Diana Serra Cary’s The Hollywood Posse: The Story of a Gallant Band of Horsemen Who Made Movie History (Houghton Mifflin, 1975); John Tuska’s The Filming of the West (Doubleday, 1976); Neal Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (Crown Publishers, 1988); and Christopher Finch’s and Linda Rosenkrantz’s Gone Hollywood (Doubleday, 1979).

I would especially like to thank my editor, Ellen Seligman, and my agent, Dean Cooke, for all the advice and the assistance they have given me.

Excerpts from this novel, in slightly different form, appeared on CBC Radio’s “Ambience” and in the journal Planet: The Welsh Internationalist.

Guy Vanderhaeghe was born in Esterhazy, Saskatchewan, in 1951. He is the author of four novels, My Present Age (1984), Homesick (1989), co-winner of the City of Toronto Book Award, The Englishman’s Boy (1996), winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Saskatchewan Book Awards for Fiction and for Book of the Year, and a finalist for The Giller Prize and the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and, most recently, The Last Crossing (2002), a long-time national bestseller and winner of the Saskatoon Book Award, the Saskatchewan Book Awards for Fiction and for Book of the Year, and the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, and a regional finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book. The Last Crossing was the winner of CBC Radio’s Canada Reads 2004. He is also the author of three collections of short stories, Man Descending (1982), winner of the Governor General’s Award and the Faber Prize in the U.K., The Trouble With Heroes (1983), and Things As They Are (1992).

Acclaimed for his fiction, Vanderhaeghe has also written plays. I Had a Job I Liked. Once , was first produced in 1991, and won the Canadian Authors Association Award for Drama. His second play, Dancock’s Dance , was produced in 1995.

Guy Vanderhaeghe lives in Saskatoon, where he is a Visiting Professor of English at S.T.M. College.