Though in this case (the man and the horse) the thing was in obverse. It was as if the man knew that he himself was invulnerable and unbreakable, and of their two, only the horse could fail, and that the man had laid out the course and built the jumps just to see where the horse must ultimately falter.
Which, by all the tenets of that agrarian and equestrian land, was exactly right; that was exactly the way to ride a horse; Rafe McCallum, one of his constant watchers, who had bred and raised and trained and sold horses all his life and who knew more about horses probably than any man in the country, said so: that when it was in the stall, treat it like it cost a thousand dollars; but when you were using it for something you had, or you and it both liked, to do, treat it like you could have bought ten like it for that many cents.
And one thing more happened or at least began about three months ago now, which the whole county had had to know about, or at least form an opinion about, for the very reason that this was the only phase or side of Captain Gualdres’ Mississippi life which he ever tried to keep, if not secret, at least private.
It had a horse in it of course because it had Captain Gualdres in it too. In fact, the county even knew specifically what horse. It was the one animal — or creature, including Captain Gualdres — in all those broad paneled manicured acres which didn’t belong even titularly to the Harrisses.
Because this one belonged to Captain Gualdres himself. He had bought it on his own selection and with his own money — or what he used for his own money: and the fact that he bought a horse with what the county believed was his mistress’s money was one of the best, perhaps the best North American stroke Captain Gualdres ever made or could have made. If he had used Mrs. Harriss’s money to buy himself a girl, which, being younger than Mrs. Harriss, they had expected all the time that sooner or later he would, the county’s contempt and disgust for him would have been exceeded only by their contempt and shame for Mrs. Harriss.
While, having decently spent her money for a horse, the county absolved him in advance by accepting the prima facie; he had gained a kind of male respectability by honorableness in adultery, fidelity and continence in pimphood; continuing (Captain Gualdres) to enjoy it for almost six weeks in fact, going himself all the way to St Louis and buying the horse and coming back in the truck with it.
It was a mare, a filly, sired by a famous imported steeplechaser and going blind from trauma, purchased of course, the county believed, to be a brood mare (which was proof to them that Captain Gualdres anyway considered his tenure on North Mississippi worth a year’s purchase at least) since there was obviously nothing else that anyone could do with a mare, no matter what the breeding, which in another year would be totally blind.
Which the county continued to believe for the next six weeks, even after they discovered that he was doing something with the mare besides simply waiting on nature, discovering this — not what he was doing with the mare, but that he was doing something with it — for that same reason that this was the first one of his horse activities which he ever tried to keep private.
Because there were no watchers, spectators this time, not only because whatever it was Captain Gualdres was doing with the mare took place at night and usually late, but because Captain Gauldres himself asked them not to come out and watch, asking them with that Latin passion for decorum and courtesy become instinctive from dealing with its own hair-triggered race, which shone even through the linguistic paucity:
‘You will not come out to see because, my honor, there is nothing now to see.’
So they didn’t. They deferred, not to his Latin honor perhaps, but they deferred. Perhaps there really was nothing to see, since there couldn’t have been very much out there at that hour worth going that distance to see; only occasionally someone, a neighbor on his way home, passing the place in the late silence, would hear hooves in one of the paddocks beyond the stables at some distance from the road — a single horse, at trot then canter then for a few beats at dead run, the sound stopping short off into complete silence while the listener could have counted two or perhaps three, then beginning once more in the middle of the dead run, already slowing back to canter and trot as if Captain Gualdres had snatched, jerked, wrenched the animal from full speed into immobility in one stride and held it so for the two or three beats, then flung it bodily into full run again, — teaching it what, nobody knew, unless as a barber-shop wit said, since it was going to be blind, how to dodge traffic on the way to town to collect its pension.
‘Maybe he’s learning it to jump,’ the barber said — a neat dapper man with a weary satiated face and skin the color of a mushroom’s belly, on whom the sun shone at least once every day because at noon he would have to cross the open street to get from the barber-shop to the All Nite Inn and eat his dinner, who if he had ever been on a horse, it was in his defenseless childhood before he could protect himself.
‘At night?’ the client said. ‘In the dark?’
‘If the horse is going blind, how does it know it’s night?’ the barber said.
‘But why jump a horse at night?’ the client said.
‘Why jump a horse?’ the barber said, slapping the brush around the foaming mug. Why a horse?’
But that was all. It didn’t make sense. And if, in the county’s opinion, Captain Gauldres was anything, he was sensible. Which — the sensibleness or at least practicalness — even proved itself by the very action which smirched his image in another phase of the county’s respect. Because they knew the answer now, to the mare, the blind mare and the night. He, the matchless horseman, was using a horse not as a horse but as a disguise; he, the amoral preyer on aging widows, was betraying the integrity of his amorality.
Not his morals: his morality. They had never had any illusions about his — a foreigner and a Latin — morals, so they had accepted his lack of them already in advance before he could have demanded, requested it even. But they themselves had foisted on, invested him with a morality, a code which he had proved now was not his either, and they would never forgive him.
It was a woman, another woman; they were forced at last to the acceptance of that which, they realised now, they had always expected of a foreigner and a Latin, knowing now at last why the horse, that horse, a horse going blind, the sound and reason for the sound of whose feet late at night nobody would understand probably, but at least nobody would bother enough about to investigate.
It was a Trojan horse; the foreigner who as yet barely spoke English, had gone all the way to St. Louis to find and buy with his own money, one meeting the requirements: blindness to establish an acceptable reason for the night absences, a horse already trained or that he himself could train to make on signal — perhaps an electrical sound every ten or fifteen minutes operated from a clock (by this time the county’s imagination had soared to heights which even horse-traders didn’t reach, let alone mere horse-trainers) — those spurts of galloping around an empty paddock, until he got back from the assignation and threw a switch and put the horse up and rewarded it with sugar or oats.
It would be a younger woman of course, perhaps even a young girl; probably was a young girl, since there was a hard ruthless unimaginative maleness to him which wore and even became the Latin formality like a young man’s white tie and tails became him and stood him in good stead, with no real effort on his part at all. But this didn’t matter. In fact, only the concupiscent wondered who the partner might be.
To the others, the rest, the most of them, the new victim was no more important than Mrs. Harriss. They turned the stem face of repudiation not on a seducer, but simply on another buck of the woods running the land, as though the native domestic supply were not enough. When they remembered Mrs. Harriss, it was as the peers and even superiors of her million dollars. They thought, not ‘Poor woman’ but ‘Poor fool.’
And for a while, during the first months of that first
