The Scorpio Races (3 page)

Finn and I don’t need to be told how dangerous the horses are. We know. We know it every day.

“Come on,” I say to him. Staring out to sea, his thin arms bracing him upright, he looks very young, just then, my little brother, though he’s really caught in that strange no-man’s-land between child and man. I feel the sudden urge to protect him from the grief that October is going to bring. But it isn’t really the grief of this October I have to worry about; it’s that of an October already long gone.

Finn doesn’t answer, just ducks back down into the Morris and shuts the door without looking at me. It’s already a bad day. And that’s before Gabe gets home.

CHAPTER TWO

SEAN

Beech Gratton, the butcher’s son, has just slaughtered a cow and is draining the blood into a bucket for me when I hear the news. We are standing in the yard behind the butcher’s, the sound of our lack of conversation amplified by the echo of our footsteps on the stone around us. The day is beautiful and cool, and I’m restless, shifting from foot to foot. The stones beneath me are uneven, pushed up by roots from trees no longer in evidence, and stained, too, brown and black, in dots and splatters and rivulets.

“Beech, did you hear yet? The horses are out,” Thomas Gratton addresses his son, emerging from the open door of his shop. He had started into the courtyard but pauses mid-stride when he sees me. “Sean Kendrick. I didn’t realize you were here.”

I don’t say anything, and Beech grunts, “Came by when he heard I was slaughtering.” He gestures to the cow’s corpse, which now hangs, decapitated and legless, from a tripod of wood. The ground’s awash with blood from where Beech was slow to place the bucket beneath the cow. The cow’s head lies off to the edge of the yard, tumbled onto its side. Thomas Gratton’s mouth works as if he’d like to say something to Beech about the scene, but he doesn’t. Thisby is an island well populated by sons disappointing their fathers.

“Did you hear, then, Kendrick?” Thomas Gratton asks. “Is that why you’re here and not on a horse?”

I am here because the new men that Malvern has hired to feed the horses are afraid at best and incompetent at worst, and the hay has been poor and the cuts of meat even worse. There’s been no blood to speak of for the
capaill uisce,
as if by treating them as regular horses the grooms hope to make them so. So I am here because I have to do things myself if I want them done properly. But I just say, “I hadn’t heard.”

Beech slaps the dead cow affably on the neck and tips the bucket this way and that. He doesn’t look at his father. “Who did you hear from?”

I don’t really care about the answer to his question; it doesn’t matter who heard or who saw what, only that the
capaill uisce
are climbing out of the sea. I can feel in my bones that it’s true. So this is why I feel restless. This is why Corr paces before his stall door and why I can’t sleep.

“The Connolly kids saw one,” Thomas Gratton says.

Beech makes a noise and slaps the cow again, more for emphasis than for any practical purpose. The Connollys’ story is one of the more pitiful ones Thisby has on offer: three children of a fisherman, orphaned twice over by the
capaill uisce.
There are plenty of single mothers to be had on the island, their men gone missing in the night, stolen away by either a savage water horse or by the temptation of the mainland. Plenty of single fathers, too, wives snatched from the shore by suddenly present teeth or seized by tourists with large wallets. But to lose both parents in one blow — that’s unusual. My story — father cold in the ground, mother lost to the mainland — is common enough to have been forgotten long ago, which is fine by me. There are better things to be known for.

Thomas Gratton watches soundlessly as Beech hands off the bucket to me and begins to indelicately butcher the corpse. It doesn’t seem like there should be an artful way to butcher a cow, but there is, and this is not it. For several long moments, I watch Beech carve jagged lines, grunting to himself all the while — I think he may be trying to hum. I am mesmerized by the utter unawareness of the entire process, the childlike pleasure Beech takes in a job ill done. Thomas Gratton and I catch each other’s eye.

“He learned his butchering from his mother, not me,” Thomas Gratton tells me. I don’t quite smile, but he seems gratified by my response anyway.

“If you don’t like how I do it,” Beech says, not looking up from his work, “I’d rather be at the pub, and this knife fits in your hand, too.”

Thomas Gratton makes a mighty sound that comes from somewhere between his nostrils and the top of his mouth; it is a sound that, to me, effectively proves the etymology of Beech’s grunts. He turns away from Beech and looks at the red-tiled roof of one of the buildings flanking the courtyard. “So I expect you’ll be riding in the race this year,” he says.

Beech doesn’t respond, because of course his father is speaking to me. I reply, “I expect so.”

Thomas Gratton doesn’t answer right away, just continues gazing at the evening sun lighting the roof tiles to brilliant orange-red. Eventually, he says, “Yes, I expect that’s what Malvern asks of you, then.”

I have worked in the Malvern Yard since I was ten, and some people say that I got the job out of pity, but those people are wrong. The Malverns’ livelihood and their name are under the roof of their stable — they export sport horses to the mainland — and they won’t have anything compromising that, far less something as humanitarian as pity. I’ve been with the Malverns long enough to know that the Grattons do not care for them, and I know that Thomas Gratton wants me to say something that will allow him to better despise Benjamin Malvern. So I allow a long pause to diffuse the weight of his question, and then I say, with a rattle of the bucket handle, “If it’s all right, I’ll settle the account for this later this week.”

Thomas Gratton laughs softly. “You are the oldest nineteen I’ve ever met, Sean Kendrick.”

I don’t reply, because he is probably right. He tells me to settle the account this Friday as usual, and Beech gives me a parting grunt as I leave the courtyard with the blood.

I need to be thinking about bringing the ponies in from the pasture and adjusting the thoroughbreds’ feed and how I will keep my little flat above the stable warm tonight, but I am thinking of the news Thomas Gratton brought. I am here on firm ground, but part of me is already down on the beach, and my own blood is singing
I’m so, so alive.

CHAPTER THREE

PUCK

That night, Gabe breaks the only rule we have.

I am unambitious with dinner, because we don’t have anything other than dried beans, and I’m sick of beans. I make an apple cake and feel rather virtuous about it. Finn is annoying me by spending the afternoon in the yard tinkering with an ancient, broken chain saw that he claims someone gave him but that he probably pulled out of someone’s rubbish because it had gears. I’m cross because I’m inside by myself, which makes me feel like I ought to be tidying, and I don’t want to tidy. I slam around a lot of drawers and cupboards while sort of messing over the eternally full sink, but Finn doesn’t hear me or pretends not to.

Finally, before the sun completely vanishes over the high ground in the west, I throw open the side door and stand there looking at Finn meaningfully, waiting for him to look up and say something to me. He is all buckled over the top of the chain saw, which lies dismembered in front of him, pieces spread tidily over the packed dirt of the yard. He wears one of Gabe’s sweaters that, while several years old, is still too large for him. He has the sleeves doubled back into fat, perfectly even cuffs, and his dark hair is mussed into an oily rooster tail. He looks like an orphan, and that makes me cross, too.

“Are you going to come in and eat the cake while it still remembers being warm?” I sound a little bratty, but I don’t care.

Finn says, without looking up, “In a minute.” He doesn’t mean a minute and I know it.

“I’m going to eat it all myself,” I say. He doesn’t reply; he’s lost in the mystery of the chain saw. I think, just for that moment, that I hate brothers, because they never realize when something is important to you and they only care about their own things.

I’m about to say something that I might be embarrassed about later when I see Gabe walking his bicycle through the dusk toward us. Neither of us says hi to him as he opens the yard gate, pushes his bicycle through, and closes it again, Finn because he is self-involved, and me because I am annoyed at Finn.

Gabe puts his bicycle away in the little lean-to by the back of the house and then comes to stand behind Finn. Gabe takes off his skullcap and holds it in his armpit, his arms crossed, wordlessly watching what Finn’s doing. I’m not sure Gabe can actually tell what it is that Finn has eviscerated in the barely there blue light of evening, but Finn rocks the body of the chain saw slightly to give Gabe a better view. This apparently tells Gabe everything he needs to know, because as Finn looks up, tilting his chin toward our older brother, Gabe just gives a little nod.

Their unspoken language both entrances and infuriates me. “There’s apple cake,” I say. “It’s still warm.”

Gabe removes his skullcap from his armpit and turns to me. “What’s dinner?”

“Apple cake,” Finn comments from the ground.

“And chain saw,” I reply. “Finn made a lovely chain saw to go with.”

“Apple cake’s fine,” Gabe says, but he sounds tired. “Puck, don’t leave the door open. It’s cold out here.” I step back so that he can walk into the house, and as he does, I notice that he stinks of fish. I hate it when the Beringers have him cleaning fish. He makes the whole house smell.

Gabe pauses in the door. I stare at him then, at the way he stands, his hand on the door frame, his face turned toward his hand as if he is studying his fingers or the chipped red paint beneath them. The way his face looks seems far away, like a stranger’s, and I suddenly want to hug him like I used to when I was small. “Finn,” he says, his voice low, “when you get that together, I need to talk to you and Kate.”

Finn looks up, his face startled, but Gabe is already gone, disappeared past me into the room he still shares with Finn despite our parents’ room being empty. Either Gabe’s request or his use of my real name has gotten Finn’s attention in a way that my apple cake couldn’t, and he begins to assemble the parts rapidly, dumping them into a battered cardboard box.

I feel unsettled while I wait for Gabe to emerge from his room. The kitchen has turned into the small, yellow place that it becomes at night when the darkness outside presses it smaller. I hurriedly wash off three plates that match and cut a fat piece of apple cake for each of us, the biggest one for Gabe. Setting them out on the table, three lonely plates where once there would’ve been five, depresses me, so I busy myself making some mint tea to go with them. As I arrange and rearrange the teacups by our plates, it occurs to me, too late, that mint tea and apple cake might not go together.

By then Finn has begun the process of washing his hands, which can take centuries. Patiently and silently he lathers his hands with the bar of milk soap, working between each finger and rubbing each line in his palm. He keeps doing it when Gabe emerges in fresh clothing but still smelling of fish.

“This is nice,” Gabe tells me as he pulls out his chair, and I’m relieved, because nothing is wrong, everything will be fine. “Mint smells good after today.”

I try to think of what Mum or Dad would’ve said to him then; for some reason, our age difference feels like a massive void just now. “I thought they had you getting the hotel ready today?”

“They were shorthanded at the pier,” Gabe says. “And Beringer knows I’m quicker than Joseph.”

Joseph is Beringer’s son, too lazy to be quick at anything. Gabe told me once that we should be grateful for Joseph’s inability to think of anything but himself, because it is why Gabe has a job. I’m not grateful at the moment, though, because Gabe smells like fish since Joseph is a feck.

Gabe holds his tea but doesn’t drink it. Finn is still washing. I sit down at my place. Gabe waits a few more beats and then says, “Finn,
enough,
okay?”

Finn still takes another minute to rinse, but then he shuts off the tap and comes and sits across from me. “Do we still say grace if it’s only apple cake?”

“And a chain saw,” I say.

“God, thank you for this cake and Finn’s chain saw,” Gabe says. “Are you happy?”

“God, or me?” I ask.

“God’s always happy,” Finn says. “You’re the one who needs pleasing.”

This strikes me as incredibly untrue, but I refuse to rise to the bait. I look at Gabe, who’s looking at his plate. I ask him, “So, what?”

Outside, I hear Dove whickering where the pasture meets the yard; she wants her handful of grain. Finn looks at Gabe, who’s still looking at his plate, pressing his fingers into the top of the apple cake as if he’s checking the texture. I am suddenly aware of how tomorrow, the anniversary of our parents’ deaths, has been looming inside me, and how it never occurred to me to think that it might be the same for quiet, solid Gabe.

He doesn’t lift his eyes. He simply says, “I’m leaving the island.”

Finn keeps his gaze on Gabe. “What?”

I can’t speak; it’s like he’s said it in a different language, and my brain has to translate it before I can understand it.

“I’m leaving the island,” Gabe tells us, and this time the statement is firmer, more real, though he still doesn’t look at either of us.

Finn manages a whole sentence first. “What will we do with all of our things?”

I add, “What about Dove?”

Gabe says,
“I’m
leaving the island.”

Finn looks like Gabe has slapped him. I jut my chin out and try to get Gabe to meet my eyes. “You’re going to go without us?” Then, my mind provides an answer, a logical one, one that gives him an excuse, and I give it to him. “So you aren’t going long. You’re just going for —” I shake my head. I can’t think of what he would be going for.