Passion Play (20 page)

The horse was an inescapable presence in Fabian’s early life, as inevitable and taken for granted as the car would become in the years of his maturity.

In the village, horses were used to pull plows, as well as to haul carts and carriages; they were treated no differently from other domestic animals, herded and penned in, their labor long and exhausting, their time at pasture brief. The whip was used to speed them up; at the first sign of illness, they were killed for meat.

As an outsider, Fabian was often sport for bands of other children, first in play, occasionally in fight, when they would turn on him in the bond and unity of their family kinship. It was during one of these games, threatening at any moment to erupt into combat, that, for the first time, Fabian found himself riding bareback.

A volatile stallion, taunted by a sheepdog lunging and snapping at it, thrashed about its enclosure, heaving against the bars, on the verge of breaking out. Fabian was tending a flock of geese when a group of boys seized him from behind, pinioning his arms, and heaved him onto the stallion’s back. Caught off guard by the sudden ballast, the stallion halted; instinctively, in the moment before the horse reared, Fabian grabbed its mane. His legs flanking the ribs, he careened on its back, fighting desperately to keep from sliding off. The dog renewed its attack, and the stallion broke its bounds, kicking the gate aslant, picking
up speed as it shot toward the open field, leaving the snapping, hapless dog and the raucous boys far behind.

Freed from the restrictions of its pen, the stallion bolted into frantic, unchecked flight, crossing a wide, pitted road in one leap, dashing into the hedges, its hoofs spraying the soft, sandy loam, the sharp branches of a cedar flogging Fabian’s legs as the animal plunged through it heedlessly.

In a quiver of time swift as light, Fabian saw a fly attached to the horse’s neck, perched just behind one ear, persisting, undisturbed by the pounding of the huge, sweaty mass that was ferrying it through the brush. He knew that, like the fly, his hope depended on clinging fast to the horse’s neck, that if he were to fall, he would be pitched onto the ground with a force that could injure or kill him.

He edged himself up, his hands tangling in the stallion’s mane, centering his chest and stomach to cradle in the niche of its back, no choice open to him other than to yield to the motion of the animal. And there he remained, the horse’s head a shield against the branches as he moved through time, calm as the fly.

The barn that quartered horses had also been the pen of much of Fabian’s boyhood. It was a lair of intimacy he often shared with them, and the scene of his initiation into the lore of sex and birth long before he could decipher the world around him, the world of men and women, girls and other boys.

A horse bristled and shook off another, bit and kicked at it in retaliation when nudged, tried to ignore it. Then the horse changed, became so gentle that Fabian at first worried that it was sick. But then, when it nuzzled and nudged the other horse, the sight stirred Fabian. It was a mare rubbing against a stallion. Her ears were now erect, vibrating to the stallion’s breath and pulse, prickling when he snorted, alert to his every move, yet she stood passive, primed for the assault of all his weight. The stallion, too, was changed, his sex engorged, his moods seesawing between playfulness and violence; sometimes he mounted the mare as if determined to pierce her entrails, to wound her before she could escape his dominion. Yet what appeared to the boy a tide of violence, the mare’s submission first to her own heat, then to the assault of the stallion, did not seem a breach in the cycle of nature. From the moment of their coupling, nature
hoarded the time needed for new life to emerge from the moist enigma of the mare’s insides.

The door of the stable, like one sovereign arm of an invisible clock, opened to admit the flush of summer and the chaff and thistle of fall, closed to shut out the onslaught of snow, opened again to acknowledge the moist scent of spring, a prelude to summer’s return. The mare slumped, restless, then lurched, uncertain whether it should trust its belly or legs for support, panic in its eyes and movements.

Soon it lay down, reluctant, even unable, to get up again. A massive shudder ran through its body, and swiftly, between the mare’s raised hind legs, the narrow muzzle of a foal appeared, its two forelegs a frame in a heaving sac of glistening filament, pliant, almost translucent.

Fabian had been ordered to tear the sac if it had not broken open while moving through the mare, and he touched the mysterious fiber in awe at this envelope that delivered new life. But the sac had already been split by the pelvis, and he saw the foal’s legs protruding without obstruction, ready for further delivery.

The mare, exhausted, waited to muster more strength; the foal, most of it still huddled inside the sphere that had formed it, attempted to move on its own, already another presence in the world that would soon claim all of it.

Fascinated and afraid, Fabian moved closer. As if responding to his gaze, the foal, prodded by the mare, pushed itself forward, sloughing off the rest of the sac, eager to leave the home that was not large enough for it anymore, even though, once it was outside the mare, the foal was still bound to it by the umbilical cord, a pulse of blood.

Fabian waited a few minutes, carefully guiding the foal away from the heaving body of the mare, then, even though he was fearful that he might be cutting a source of life, he severed the umbilical cord boldly. The foal was on its own now.

Trembling to its feet within minutes, shaking but steady enough to keep its balance, it staggered about, oblivious of Fabian; confused, the foal broke into its first walk around the mare, then, exhausted, lay quietly at its side, waiting. In the morning, Fabian would run to his master’s house to bring the news of the new life in his barn.

Later, with the mare resting and the foal surprised by its first sleep outside the womb, Fabian would lie in the straw, pondering the birth he had just witnessed. With a rush of envy and apprehension, he thought about the place that the foal had so heedlessly abandoned in the mare, its stall of warmth and safety, now bartered for the hazard of whip.

He warmed at the thought of the mare and how he would have liked to nest inside it, alone there, well fed, its flanks his walls, its withers and croup his roof, its legs absorbing the shock of uneven terrain, and how he would be free to peek out at the hostile world merely by lifting the mare’s tail, a curtain he might raise or lower on an uncertain stage.

It was then, when still a boy, that Fabian saw a horse die. The animal might have been grazing at pasture or hauling a plow or even resting in the barn. He remembered how, stirring to a portent of menace that seemed an alien odor invading its muzzle, the horse bolted, its head erect, its eyes hurtling to and fro, desperate to locate the lurking terror.

Unable to make out its enemy, to move swiftly from the threat, powerless to flee its sense of foreboding, confused, the animal faltered in a spasm of panic and pain, betrayed by its own body, its breathing easy no more, its heartbeat, once so measured, broken now, erratic. It heaved its head about, instinctively searching out the presence of a herd, for others like itself, who, in this last moment of life, would offer a confirmation of continuing existence, copious and teeming.

But there was no herd within its field of vision, no others to offer support, to draw sustenance from. Dread fusing with pain, the animal for whom earth had been a field over which to range and race, found that it could move no more, its muscles, tendons, ligaments withered, refusing to answer the summons of life that still nettled in its brain. It nodded instead to another signal, the drifting call of gravity, nature’s last.

Fabian watched as the great bridge of the horse buckled, the useless pillars of its legs slipped sideways, the boom of its neck twisted, the head, an empty bucket, pitching down.

In a moment, the horse’s power to breathe and to run, the license to continue in life, had been snatched from it, a merciless abolishment as arbitrary as the generosity with which life had
been offered once to that newborn foal quivering under Fabian’s eyes. Now he saw that the body, which only a little while before had commanded the earth with matchless speed and endurance, was a heap of bone and meat, wrapped still and again, as at the beginning, in a steaming sac of skin.

In life, the horse had always appeared to Fabian fleet and airborne, almost weightless as it skimmed the ground, gracefully springing back from the surface with the ricochet of its hoofs. Now, in death, it lay slack, the plane of its flank level with the earth, dense and resistant, dragged at the end of a thick chain by a sluggish ox, the horse’s legs floundering each time its body passed over a freshly plowed furrow.

It was often Fabian’s task to gut the dead horse. In the barn, an ax handy, his knives sharpened on a whetstone, he would start by cutting open the main arteries, letting the blood from the severed vessels drip into a heap of desiccated hay. He then opened the base of the stomach, its entrails still hot, and started to disembowel the horse, piece by piece, organ after organ, mindful not to discard the edible delicacies of liver, heart, kidneys and tripe, or to soil them with the noxious colon and bloated cecum; unlike the rabbits, sheep and pigs he had often gutted, a horse had no gall bladder that, when carelessly cut, would spill its bile. He would then dump the offal and carrion into a corroded barrel and roll it down a small hill toward a pit he had dug, leaving the barrel open there, a feast for crows, dogs and rats.

If the work did not sicken him, the poring over the spongy mass, his hands and clothes bloodied, the mingled smells of blood, excrement and half-digested food, it was because he would always think of the supple grace and fluent perfection of the horse in motion, its muscles surging to pull a cart, flexing in a walk, stretching and thrusting at a gallop.

The flesh was gone now, the choicest hunks of meat hacked out by the farmer and stored in the icy pits under the main house. Only the skeleton remained before Fabian, its bones soon to be smashed and scattered at the edge of the forest, far from the pasture and fields that had been the horse’s domain. Above
all other abandoned, useless and decaying parts of the dead horse’s body, the skeleton bothered Fabian most. Unlike the animal’s skin or blood, the intestines, lungs, nerves or muscles, each a forge of moisture and heat, a furnace of life, the skeleton, with its two hundred and more bones that Fabian had once counted, seemed no more complex than the crude pillars, posts, joints and frames that made up the barn—and no more mysterious.

If the skeleton was the bony soul, the hardened essence of the horse, it appeared, when juxtaposed with the living mass of the animal, rather as its opposite, a caricature supplanting pliancy with rigor, fluency with brittleness, motion with stillness. What would have happened to the horse, Fabian wondered, if, throughout its life, instead of relying on its instinct, the animal had sought support only from its skeleton?

Later in life, domesticated in his VanHome, Fabian would pass at random across the border of California and Nevada, stopping, when the impulse took him, at Dante’s View, a point of observation from which his gaze could sweep out over the panorama of Death Valley, a shallow, arid basin of rocks and flats, the floor of the continent he traveled incessantly, that rose at its farthest rim to the snowy drifts of Mount Whitney, climbing the grizzled slopes until it came to rest on the peak needling the sky.

Posted above that parched and hazy sheet of Death Valley, he would marvel at the tolerance of nature, its indifferent generosity that permitted springs and streams, a lake and swamp, fish and other creatures native only to this measureless vacancy, in the midst of heat sometimes unmatched by any other on earth.

Having left his VanHome miles away in the safety of a motel parking lot, he would descend into the valley, then take refuge on an islet in a sudden grove, an oasis of surprise, bending, marshy rushes fringing the edge of its trickling stream. There he would lie down, the sandy heat kneading his back, Big Lick and Gaited Amble nuzzling him or heaving to rest at his side, the shield of his eyes a screen for dreams and thought, the film of
his imagining broken only by a need as rude as thirst or hunger.

In the ceaseless rhythm of the stream, the darting flicker of a snake, the visit of a suddenly startled heron, the brooding of his horses at the shallow dunes, Fabian saw his solitude and his flight beyond the boundaries of time known and time yet to be forayed, testament to his joy and his lamentation, harbingers of a voyage whose destination he could not ever know.

It was here, riding one day, that Fabian saw, far away on the flats, a herd of wild horses, their spotted hides a camouflage, their run kicking a screen of dust against the darkened hills and mountains.

He started to follow the herd, prompting Gaited Amble into a smooth gallop, and when she began to pant, spent with heat, he vaulted easily to Big Lick, the horses’ gait unbroken. Soon he was close enough to make out the wild mustangs cantering loosely in a moving heap. Several mounted men chased the herd, hooting and slapping their thighs, slashing their whips at the slower horses, while a dozen or so dogs darted round the flanks of the mustangs, nipping at them.

Fabian followed the dusty, pounding blur. A massive corral suddenly loomed in the distance, row upon row of trenches scooped deeply out of the crumbling soil like open scars in the parched landscape, waiting to heal. Perched high above the corral, he watched, binoculars magnifying the sight, as the men and dogs tightened their trap around the herd, the wild ponies still frenzied though buckling in the surge of sun and sand and their sweating multitude. He heard the first shot ring out, and then the volley of rifles, mixed with the faint neighing of the panicked horses as the mounted men steered the herd toward the ditches. Some animals collapsed where they stood, others were dragged down by the force of their own speed and weight, keeling into the trenches, their necks and heads straining high in terror, gouging their last breath of air in the valley of death, halting abruptly as they rammed into each other, muzzles smashing against ribs as they tripped and toppled, heaving to stay erect, some trampled already, others clawing from below, rearing from under the stampeding herd, only to be felled by a bullet or by the melee about them, sliding back into the ditch, a few still struggling hopelessly to leap out.