An Undisturbed Peace (3 page)

Such was his distraction on entering the barn that he walked straight into the burly chest of the stable master. “Ho, there!” the man barked in a graveled voice of infinite command. Abrahan stopped short, jumped back, then craned his neck to look up at the giant towering above him, a red-bearded man in a leather apron tied over the buckskins they all wore. A pair of dung-covered great boots covered his giant's feet. His gloved hands were on his hips and his dirty blue-eyed face was a mix of scowl and smirk.

He was an Irishman named O'Hanlon who ate and slept with the equines and stable boys under his care. Abrahan had never heard a word against him. On the contrary, the mounted peddlers all but worshipped him for his knowledge and devotion to their steeds. The stable boys were largely black slaves. The rest were O'Hanlon's handpicked indentured apprentices. Both slaves and apprentices respected him without rancor. Still, Abrahan was off to a clumsy start with the man. He quaked a bit in his own short, mud-spattered boots. O'Hanlon saw this and softened his voice without seeming to coddle him.

“You would be Abrahan?”

“Yes sir, I am.”

“I'll be callin' you Abe, if you don't mind, lad. Now, what do you know of God's most noble creature, a beast far nobler than man?”

“Little, sir.”

“I thank you for your honesty, Abe. Many of the fools who come in here expectin' me to hand 'em their reins and give 'em a leg up and out into the wide world have not such candor. But as it is, we have our work cut out for us, don't we. I think you'd best be stayin' here with me and the boys the next weeks or more. I'll work you hard and I'll work you day and night but you'll know a thing or two before you're off into the sunset with one of my dears for the fortune and glory of Isadore Sassaporta. It's the least I owe him.”

Abrahan understood O'Hanlon meant the horse, not his uncle. He gathered his nerve, puffed out his chest, and nodded in agreement with all the man's conditions. Next thing he knew, they were marching off to a dirt paddock where a fearsome equine was engaged in a vigorous effort at liberation, pulling against the rope that tied him to a fencepost. His eyes showed their whites. His teeth were bared. His thick mane rose and fell with each mighty toss of his head, and to Abrahan's eyes, he looked huge, although he was barely a horse at all, just 14.2 hand with his shoes on. He was a dark bay with a full tail, a mark in the shape of a crescent moon on his forehead, and two rear socks. He'd been chosen based on Isadore's description of his nephew. “Be on the lookout for him in days to come,” Sassaporta had written O'Hanlon in a note of introduction. “From the neck up, a handsome boy, dark with a trim beard and a salesman's flashing eyes. From the neck down, on the runty side, short with a strong trunk and thick thighs.” The horse may have been small for his kind, but nonetheless at a scant nine hundred pounds, he looked formidable while struggling against his restraints.

O'Hanlon gestured that Abrahan should enter the paddock. “Go right up to him, lad, and make his acquaintance. His proper name is King of Harts. We call him Hart.”

Like many a man before him, Abrahan summoned images of his darling's soft breast and warm, enveloping thighs to give him courage for the task at hand. For Marian, he swore to himself as he bent to step through the fence rails and enter the arena, where—for all he knew—a hoof might soon plow through his skull and end his dreams forever. For Marian.

Watching him approach, the horse twisted and strained toward him. He planted his hooves firmly on the ground and locked his knees, a pose that made his powerful outstretched neck look monstrously long. The rope keeping him attached to the fencepost looked pulled to the point at which it might suddenly snap. He made a deep, rolling hum Abrahan could not translate. It sounded menacing, like the low chortle of a pirate about to send a man off the plank with the point of a dagger at his back. He broke into a sweat. The sky above went darker yet and from the distant hills a roll of thunder echoed the beast's sound. The young man marshaled his courage and put one foot in front of the other until he was inches from the horse's muzzle. He followed O'Hanlon's instructions. “Mr. Hart,” he said, clearly although not without a tremor, “I am Abrahan Bento Sassaporta Naggar, known as Abe. I am to be your master.”

The horse bobbed his head up and down, emitted that rolling hum again, but at least did not seem ready to kill him. Behind him, Abrahan heard the shuffle of feet and the murmur of men. He glanced over his shoulder to see O'Hanlon and three of his slaves hanging off one another, weak with muffled laughter. Found out, they erupted into guffaws.

“He's playin' with you! He's only beggin' a bite to eat!” said O'Hanlon. “We took him off his hay to meet you!”

Abrahan turned full about to face down those who'd ridiculed him. His cheeks burned. He set his lips to a grim line as he tried to imagine what he could possibly say to regain his dignity. Before he had a chance, Hart moved forward, which slackened the rope, giving him lead enough to head-butt poor Abrahan against the fence and push him into it with long, hard strokes of his enormous head against the greenhorn's back.

“Oh, forgive me, Abe, me bucko, me lad,” O'Hanlon roared. “I'm forgettin' to tell you the first rule of horsemanship. …”

Hart pushed him into the fence rails so hard, Abrahan feared his ribs would break.

“Never turn your back on a horse!” finished O'Hanlon. His men near collapsed onto the ground with mirth.

Over the next weeks, Abrahan began to think of himself as Abe. It was difficult not to. The name rang through the air constantly. Abe! Bring water! Abe! Polish that harness! Abe! Clean these stalls! Abe! Brush that horse! Abe! Pick his feet while you're at it too! Every day, he began work just before dawn and slept only when the horses were fed and watered, the barn aisles swept, the tack polished, the buckets scrubbed, and the horses watered again. For three hours a day, he did nothing but ride.

He loved that part. Despite the pain of a beginner's bottom full of saddle sores, the joy of sitting there, galloping in circles around the exercise ring, made him feel a lord of the earth and sky. He fell many times, but eventually by dint of sheer will and desire for Marian of the foothills, he managed to learn how to point a horse right and left, how to speed him up and slow him down, at least in principle. At first the horse Hart and he found themselves at war, then they came to truce, and finally, to a kind of partnership of which Abe was the junior member. Abe learned to trust the animal's good sense and worked to win his loyalty. After a month, he felt his true master. Yes, he thought in the end, difficult and arduous as these weeks have been, they've made a horseman of me and I believe a good one. Which is why on that fine spring day he left the stables with Hart under saddle, both of them packed with all the merchandise man and beast can comfortably carry at one heroic go, O'Hanlon's parting words to them seemed not jocular but queer, wildly queer. Perhaps it was his tone.

“You've got a good, honest horse, there, Abe,” he said, normally enough, with just a hint of manly sentiment. “List to what he tells you. And you, you bugger,” he said to Hart, and this is where his voice changed, becoming dark, full of foreboding. “No funny business. Give the lad a break now and again. Alright, be off with you.”

O'Hanlon slapped Hart's rump. Hart trotted off into the woods, absently chewing his bit with a puzzled Abe astride. He wondered at the boss's words for a few minutes before remembering to shorten his reins and pay attention to his mount, who had begun to go willy-nilly, grabbing whatever tender leaves he found at nose level. Leaning forward to rip the branches out of Hart's teeth while straightening him out took all the young man's concentration. O'Hanlon faded from his mind.

The Piedmont, North Carolina, 1829

T
hey started out soundly enough. It took a little time for man and beast to settle down but for their first venture out alone together, it went well. Hart took the downhill paths faster than Abe would have liked considering the load they carried. A lot of weight bounced against their backs and the hills just below the Blue Ridge Mountains were rocky. But that was Abe's only complaint of him. They came to a clearing the second morning, a beautiful hollow with tall grass and wildflowers in every color imaginable. It looked an oasis of some kind, an expanse of lovely dirt after the punishing, stony route they'd taken so far. Hart wouldn't cross it. He clung to the inside of the tree line, happy to walk the long way around, but when Abe asked him to advance into the open, he refused. Abe asked again. Again, he refused. Abe was frustrated. He made to force him. He kicked Hart's sides as hard as he could. He slapped his rump and his neck with the flat of his hand and when that didn't work, he used the whip. Hart snorted. He sped up but shortened his step. He pulled against the reins 'til Abe thought his arms would leave their sockets.

He should have listened to the horse as O'Hanlon instructed him. Instead, he kept up the struggle. The inevitable moment came when he lost the battle. Just inside the edge of the woods, Hart broke into a gallop. Abe lost control completely. Hart raised his head, nostrils flared. He had a mad look in his eye. He was entirely to himself and the peddler an annoyance he ignored. Abe flopped about on his back as bothersome to the horse as a cloud of gnats.

Abe was terrified. If he fell off at that pace, he might die. He lost his reins and clung for dear life to the front edge of the saddle. Hart galloped on without concern for him. The two knocked against branch and brush. Some of the wares they carried came loose and flew through the air. Tin cups and pans banged into tree trunks, china plates smashed against rocks.

Oh, they made a terrible racket. All of nature tried to get out of their way. Birds flew from the trees. Rabbits leapt through the grass. Abe heard larger things, he knew not what, bound off, throwing clods of dirt into the air, making odd thuds. Then, suddenly, without warning, Hart stopped short. Abe shot from his saddle like a cannonball, landing at the foot of a grandfather oak. He lay on the ground, breathing heavily, thanking God he hadn't crashed into it. The trunk would have cracked his spine. After checking his limbs—it was a miracle nothing broke—he got up, bleeding from his arms, his thighs, and the back of his head. Hart, meanwhile, had slunk under the cover of a stand of trees just behind him. His ears were splayed out at the sides, listening, waiting, and then Abe heard what kept Hart from the clearing all that time, what stopped him short, the thing he knew that Abe did not.

Screams. Horrid, bloodcurdling screams. The screams of women, and, he judged, children. Many of them. Out of nowhere, a stiff breeze came up and then he could smell what Hart smelled earlier. The iron scent of blood, rivers of it, he was sure, because the scent was strong and whatever its source, whatever mayhem was happening, it was too far away for him to witness with his eyes. He had only his ears and his nose, which next caught the scent of smoke, the burning of grass and wood and he didn't dare think what else, but it was something stinging and sour. All he knew for certain was that hell lay ahead and so he did what was reasonable.

He fled. He mounted, dug his heels into Hart's side, and loosed his reins. The horse didn't need a second prod. He bolted deep into the wilderness. Once they stopped, miles later, Abe took out his map and realized that again, he was impossibly lost. He hadn't a clue where they were or how far off the map's route they'd got. All he knew was that they'd run a long time until they were well free of the screaming, the blood, and the smoke.

It was night, but he was afraid to sleep. He tried to determine from the stars where Marian was and headed in what he prayed was the right direction. Sometime in the night, he rested Hart by a place where he could drink. Later, he fed him what grain he had left. He would have rested longer but the horse pulled his head up again. His ears twitched. He started to prance. Abe understood he had to mount him straightaway and ride wherever the horse judged best because again the beast heard danger that he did not.

After a time, clouds covered the moon and the stars. The sky went dark and he could not see much before them. A low-hanging branch jostled him. His seat went wrong, which tottered the horse. They tumbled down a steep slope of rocks, ripping their flesh 'til both bled freely, but then once more they heard horsemen and wagon wheels and weeping. They were pursued by demons no matter what direction they chose. There was nothing to do but rise and flee from where they had fallen. Abe struggled up and hoisted himself onto Hart. They rode through what was left of the night and all the next day until by some holy accident they arrived at the blessed clearing that was home to Marian of the foothills.

Marian stood halfway between her cabin and the goat pen. Through half-closed eyes slit by pain and exhaustion, Abe watched her shield her face with one hand and look into the brilliant yellow red of the setting sun behind them, which doubtless blinded her. He hoped she could make out that a compromised horse and rider approached, that the horse moved in a halting way, listing to one side every other step, and that the rider was bent over its neck. Her neck straightened, her pose suddenly full of urgency, as if there were no reason she could imagine a man would continue to ride a horse that perilously lame unless he was dead. They came closer. The sun set a little more. Her hand dropped. “Oh, Great Father of the Trees and Sky!” she cried out. “It's my little peddler!”

She broke into a run toward them.

When she reached them, she checked Abe first, saw that he was breathing. He was barely conscious and moaned out of great pain from several wounds to his limbs that had already closed and dried. She pulled him from his mount, quickly assessed his condition, and let him slide to the ground. Through barely open eyes, Abe watched her tend to the horse as she stripped him quickly of saddle and gear, ripping her shirt to bind his right foreleg where a long gash dripped blood. He tried to speak to tell her the flesh around the wound was swollen and hot, which indicated infection, but his voice failed him. “Come, horse,” she said, “come with me to where you can rest.” She herded the goats out of their pen and put her mare in it, then led Hart to the three-sided shed where her own horse usually sheltered and bedded its floor with fresh straw. Twice she slapped Abe's horse hard on his belly with both hands to keep him on his feet. She washed his leg, applied an herbal paste, and wrapped him again, winding long strips of cloth from his ankle to his knee. She washed other less serious injuries. She gave him water, holding a bucket under his nose for his ease. She fed him a warm mash. Abe stretched out a trembling hand to her, supplicating for like treatment, but she did not come to him. He closed his eyes and slipped into unconsciousness.

Early the next morning, Abe came to on the grass in front of the cabin. He was surrounded by munching goats, one of whom had woken him by biting at his hair. He limped to her door. She was not inside. He found her in the shed, sleeping next to his horse, who was reclining. Her head lay against his back. With difficulty, considering the pain of his own disabilities, Abe got inside the fence and then kicked at her foot. She opened her eyes and looked at him without expression. “You left me there to die,” he said. She blinked. “You look alright to me.” He blushed. “Well, I am now, but I could have died out there. I could have.” The woman shrugged. “You were not in danger. This one was in greater peril.” Hart's ears twitched at the sound of Abe's voice. In one sweeping move, the horse shifted his weight, got his feet under him, stood and rubbed his head once over Abe's trunk. The greeting looked to cost him significant effort. Abe took his head in his hands and kissed him above the eyes. Marian got to her feet as well. “Come,” she said. “We'll change his wrap and feed him. Then we'll have a good look at you.”

When they removed the bandage from Hart's leg, the wound looked much improved. Marian offered a prayer of thanksgiving in her sacred language. Abe did the same in his. By the time they finished ministering to his mount, he felt as close to her as he had after three and one-half days of lovemaking at the end of last summer. As if answering his unspoken prayer, she put an arm around his waist and helped him into her home, where she stripped him, washed his wounds with all the care she'd given the horse, applying the same paste to those she reopened. Abe summoned every ounce of stoicism he possessed not to wince or groan while she worked on him and he was successful, although once or twice he sucked air through his teeth. “Now, tell me what happened that brought you to my door in this state,” she said once she put him to bed, naked under the animal skins. He sipped one of her healing soups from a clay bowl and felt oddly at home. He wanted to gather her in his arms but she was at the wood stove stirring more soup so he reported every detail he could remember instead.

Marian took in all he told her in silence. She left to tend her animals and his. When she returned, she sat on the bed. He was nearly asleep by then, but through his fog of pain and longing, he heard her say, “I know who it was, torturing women and children, carting them away.”

“Who?”

“It was the hirelings of my beautiful white neighbors who want my people gone from these hills. That's who.”

“What do you mean?”

“It's as regular as the seasons. The whites raid our villages. We raid theirs. This happens usually at the borders of our territories, but lately, they hire the most vicious warriors to advance deeper and deeper into our forests. First it was the low country, now the foothills. They think to ride over us into the mountains.”

“Then you're in danger, Marian. You must come back to my uncle's town with me.”

Marian laughed. “I've been in danger ever since I left my clan. I've been in more danger ever since I took over this cabin when the daughter of old Turkey Foot went to live with her new man in Tennessee. I will not go with you. I've fought white men off before. I will not leave the land.”

“Come with me. I owe you this much.” She looked at him with her eyebrows raised and shrugged.
Why?
the shrug asked.
Why do you owe me?
He said, “For everything you've done for me today and for my horse.” Her expression went from questioning to something with a touch of exasperation in it. “Why would I not help two injured creatures at my door? Consider my debt for the gunpowder paid.”

He reached for her and took up her hands, kissed them. He fixed his gaze to hers.

“Marian. I fear you are underestimating the troubles around you. I heard those people. I heard the screams. I smelled the burning, perhaps of their very flesh. I want you to come with me. I am in love with you. I will take care of you forever.”

“Peddler,” she said, because she could not remember his name, “I will not go with you. I do not love you. I do not even know you. Except now, I am beginning to see you are a fool.”

The young lover was dumbstruck. His jaw flapped uselessly, as he had not words for her nor could he pull any out of his heart or mind or the thin mountain air. The sight of him, wide-eyed and robbed of speech, jaw flapping away, his lower lip dropping to expose pink gums, proved the point of her assessment. She shrugged, told him the soup had something in it that would make him sleep, as sleep would heal him, and prepared to leave the cabin for her daily chores of milking goats, working her fields, and hunting game. When finally he managed to shout, “Marian, wait!” she was gone.

He tried to get up, but the drug in the soup made his limbs too stiff and there was nothing to do but close his heavy eyes and drift away.

He slept like the dead. Had a fire, earthquake, or hurricane occurred, he'd have entered paradise yawning and confused. When he did wake, it was near noon the following day. The streaming sun opened his eyes. He was alone. His limbs were still stiff but less so. His clothes were at the foot of the bed, clean and folded. His boots were next to them. He washed his hands in a pot of standing water and dressed before muttering a short, hasty version of his morning prayers, adding at their end an entreaty to the Divine that what he foggily remembered as insult and rejection from Marian was in fact a drug-addled phantasm, a dream. In the unlikely event he was wrong and it had really happened, he added yet another prayer for the cleverness required to change her mind, which was surely inevitable, for what woman could resist the power of a grand, pure, and eternal passion?

A wooden bowl with a spoon sticking out of it lay on the stone mantel. Inside was a breakfast of boiled wild grains, chopped nuts, and fresh red berries. There was a jug of goat's milk nearby. He poured milk into the bowl and walked out the door, spooning away. It was a pleasant afternoon, the air warm, the sky blue. A gentle breeze caressed his skin and hair. Hart grazed peaceably with the goats. Marian and her mare were gone.

Abe lingered a bit with a preoccupied Hart and his goat friends in case she'd just left for a short time, but he soon grew bored with waiting. He found his wares in her storage shed and went through them to see what he had lost and what remained. The result was not half as bad as he feared. When he investigated his store of gunpowder, a warm pride in his beloved enveloped him. It was all there. Marian had not taken a grain of it. So much for the lying, thieving Indian he'd been warned about constantly from the first day he arrived on the golden American shore!

The day wore on. He poked about the cabin. There wasn't much to explore. Most of the items in the cabin were practical. Each tool was kept in a logical place in prime condition. Such methodical order quickened the beating heart in Abe's chest. He admired a woman so unlike his mother who was self-effacing­, provincial, ever fearful of doing something of which her neighbors would not approve. But this one. Everything about her home signaled that Marian was in charge, that she kept her house and her mind under command. He imagined what it would be like to submit to her authority, to linger in a warm bath of submission under the eye of a benign mistress, and then he blushed there in her one-room home, ashamed of his fantasies, regarding them a perversion of his mission to care for her, to save her from the hostile forces around them. He loved her infinitely, he decided at last. He'd never loved before. He had no way to measure the swelling of his heart, the obsession of his mind on her account, against a lesser love so this, he figured, was pretty much all that love could be. The way he'd met her a year earlier by accident, the way he'd found the route back to her while injured, disoriented, barely conscious—it all felt like destiny. He knew that she'd inspired him to the greatest acts of industry and bravery in all his life and if being near her meant he must subject himself, even to the point of subjecting his very manhood, he'd do it.