The Flying Goat (3 page)

It was Friday afternoon when he rode Snowy down the track by the spinney and out across the buttercup field and down to the edge of the quarry. He sat bare-back, the only way he knew how to ride, and the warm sweat of a canter in the hot sun across the shadeless field broke out on his legs and seemed to glue him to the pony. The delight of being alone, in the heat and silence of a midsummer afternoon that seemed to grow more and
more intense as the ripe grasses deepened about the pony's legs like dusty wheat, was something he loved and could hardly bear. The may-blossom was over now, like cream soured and gone in the sun, and elderberry had taken its place, sweet-sour itself, the summery vanilla odour putting the whole sheltered hollow to sleep. So that as he halted Snowy and called down to the camp to young Shako, who was lying alone in the grass by the side of the hobbled little brown cob, his voice was like the sudden cracking of a cup in the stillness.

‘Ready to race?'

‘Eh?'

Young Shako turned sharply and rolled to his feet like a black untidy puppy, blinking in the sun.

‘Now?' he called back.

‘It's Friday!' Alexander said. ‘You said Friday.'

‘Right-o! Wait'll I git the cob.'

Young Shako began to untie the rope hobbling the cob's fore-legs, but Alexander was no longer looking at him. The camp was deserted again except for the cob and the boy, but down under the caravan Alexander could see suddenly a white-washed
crate, an empty hen-crate. It startled and excited him so much that he hardly realised that Young Shako was ready and already calling his name.

‘Hiyup! You go along the top and I'll go along the bottom and meet you!'

‘Right-o!'

Alexander turned the white pony and almost simultaneously young Shako scrambled belly-wise on the cob's back and turned him in the same direction along the brookside. They rode along together, hoofs making no noise in the thick grass, the excitement of silence beating deeply in the boy's breast and throat. It seemed to him too that Snowy was excited, sensing something. His head seemed exceptionally high up, splendid in the sun, with a sort of alert nobility, his beauty and strength flowing out to the boy, so that he felt outlandishly proud and strong himself.

Gradually the quarry-face shallowed down until the land was entirely on one level. Alexander halted Snowy and waited for young Shako to come up to him. The land had begun to be broken up by sedge and to Alexander it looked as though the cob, struggling between the stiff rushes on
ground bubbled by ant-hills, was ugly and ordinary and short-winded. Until that moment the boys had not spoken again, but now Shako said where were they going to race? Up on the top field above the marsh? And Alexander said ‘Yes, up in the top field', and they rode the horses away from the brook together, skirting the marsh where even the high spears of reed were dead still in the windless afternoon, blades of dark green steel sharp in the sun above the torches of lemon iris and islands of emerald grass among the fly-freckled pools.

‘So they got back from Huntingdon?' Alexander said.

‘Yeh! Got back. Got back late last night.'

‘Gone somewhere to-day?'

‘Only down to the market. Be back any time now.'

‘How far are we going to race?'

‘Far as you like.'

‘Make it from the fence over to the first sycamore, shall we?' Alexander said.

‘Ain't very far.'

‘All right. Make it from the fence over to the feed-trough. That's a good way.'

‘All right,' Shako said. ‘Anybody who falls off loses.'

The sun beat down on them strongly as they turned up the field to meet it. Snowy lifted his head and Alexander could feel in him a sudden excited vibration of strength. His own heart was beating with such deep sickness that as they reached the fences and turned the horses he could not speak. He sat tense and silent, his senses cancelled out by the suspense of excitement. In this moment the world too was cancelled out except for the dazzling blaze of buttercups and the poised chalk statue of Snowy's head and the murmur of grasshoppers breaking and carrying away the silence on tremulous and infinite waves of sound.

Another second and young Shako counted three and lifted his hand and dropped it and Alexander did not know anything except that something amazing and unearthly happened to Snowy. He became something tearing its way off the golden rim of the earth. He felt him to be like a great white hare bouncing madly into space. He leaned forward and clung to his neck, frightened of falling or being thrown. The sycamore trees sailed past like balloons broken adrift and five seconds later he saw the two stone feed-troughs flash past him like boats torn from their moorings too.

Snowy did not come to a standstill until they reached the hedge and the end of the field. He stood for a moment fretting and panting deeply. It had been like a burst of majestic fury. It filled Alexander with a pride and astonishment that momentarily took his speech away, so that as he turned and saw young Shako and the cob clumsily pulling up at the troughs he could not speak.

He walked Snowy slowly back. His pride was one with the pony's, deep, quiet, almost dignified. It sprang out of the pony's heart. It stirred him to a few seconds of such love for the horse that he suddenly dismounted and seized his warm dribbling head in his hands.

‘You see, I told you,' he said to Shako at last. ‘He's been a race-horse.'

‘Wadn't much,' Shako said. The deep Spaniard eyes were prouder in defeat than Alexander's were in triumph. ‘Cob was just tired after that long journey from Huntingdon. Bet y' I'd race you to-morrow and win y' easy. What y' goin' be up to now? Going home?'

Alexander remembered how Old Shako and his brothers Plum and Charley must be back from market soon, perhaps now, already.

‘No,' he said, ‘I'll come back a bit with you. Cool Snowy off and perhaps give him a drink.'

‘Don't wanna give him no drink while he's so ragin' hot.'

‘No, I know that. I'll just walk steady back with you. I want a drink myself.'

They walked back down the field towards the stream, not saying much. Snowy was oily with sweat and the heat caught Alexander in the nape of the neck like a blow as they came into the sheltered ground beyond the quarry.

It was at that moment he saw that old Shako and Plum and Charley were back, one of the women with them. He saw the flare of the woman's yellow blouse and the dark beet-red skirt. The men were gaunt, hungry as hawks, shifty, with untranslatable darkness behind the friendliness of their eyes.

‘Young Bish!' Old Shako said. He grinned with white eager teeth. ‘Thass nice pony you got. Fus' time I see him.'

‘Nice pony,' Shako's brothers said.

The three men came round the horse, laying long dark hands on the white flanks.

‘Nice pony.' Old Shako looked at Snowy's
mouth, and Alexander felt proud that Snowy stood so still and lovably dignified.

‘Nice pony. On'y thing is he's gettin' old,' Shako said. ‘Been about awhile.'

‘Nice pony though,' Charley said.

‘Yis. Nice pony,' Shako said. ‘You wanna look after him. Be gettin' 'im pinched else. Nice pony like that.'

The dark hands were smoothed on the white flanks again, and it seemed suddenly to Alexander that they might be hands of possession. His fears were suddenly heightened by something Shako said. ‘Knew a man once, Cakey Smith, he had a white horse and got it pinched. Somebody painted it black. Right, aint' it, Charley?'

‘Right,' Charley said.

Alexander did not speak. He knew that they were kidding him. He saw sparks of lying winks flash out of Shako's eyes, but he was suddenly frightened. He got hold of Snowy's bridle and prepared to lead him away and all at once the woman's voice came sing-songing from the caravan:

‘Oh! the boy's lucky. Got a lucky face all right. Got a lucky face. Nobody'll pinch nothing from him. A lucky nice face he's got. Lucky. He'll be all right.'

‘Well, so long,' Alexander said.

‘So long,' young Shako said. ‘Race y' to-morrow if y' want.'

Suddenly Alexander's wits came back. He remembered why he was here, what it was all about. He remembered what his wild plan had been.

‘I can't come to-morrow,' he said. ‘Not Saturday.' He felt new sweat break and flush his face as he told the lie. ‘We're going out. All of us. Over to Aunt Tilda's for the night. Going to-morrow afternoon and not coming back till Sunday.'

‘Lucky boy,' the woman said. ‘Oh! You're a lucky boy.'

He walked away with her voice following him calling him lucky, and feeling the sombre eyes of the men swivelling after him. Once up the slope and beyond the spinney he could not walk fast enough. He stopped Snowy by a fence and got on his back. He rode up the track under a deep impulse of excitement and an imagination flared by the behaviour of Snowy and the gipsies and all he had heard.

He rode into the farmyard to put up the basking hens in a scared squawking clutter of brown and
white wings. He leapt off the horse and felt the terrific excitement of a kind of heroism as he ran into the house, knowing that the time had come when he could keep things to himself no longer, knowing that he had to tell somebody now.

The following night, Saturday, Alexander lay in the little iron bedstead in the apple bedroom with his trousers on and his boots in readiness under the bed. ‘No!' Aunt Bishop had said, ‘they ain't goin' to sit up for no fox and no nothing else, so there! And even if they was you'd get to bed and get your sleep just the same. So don't whittle your belly about that!'

Very excited, he lay listening for a long time in the warm darkness of the little room. Twice he got up and stood at the window and looked out, smelling the summer night, seeing nothing to break the colour of darkness except the rosy-orange flowering of distant iron-ore furnaces on the hills beyond the river, hearing nothing to break the sound except a momentary lift of breeze stirring the pear-leaves
on the house-wall under the window. For long periods he sat up in bed, eyes wide open so that they should not close altogether, and once he got up and, for the first time in his life, voluntarily washed his face. The cold water woke him afresh and after what seemed to him hours he heard the twang-clanging of the American clock, with the view of Philadelphia 1867, being wound by his Aunt Bishop in the living-room below, and then her feet on the stairs and finally the latch of her bed-room door breaking one silence and beginning another.

He waited for what he felt was five minutes and then got up and put on his jacket and tied his boots round his neck. He opened the door of his room and waited, listening. His heart seemed to pound at the darkness. He knew that the stairs creaked at every step and finally he lay on the banisters and slid down with no sound but a faint snake-like slither. The kitchen door was unlocked and he went out that way, sitting on the door-mat to put on his boots.

In the darkness his senses were so sharpened by excitement that he could feel the presence of his Uncle Bishop and Maxie before he heard the whispers of their voices. They were sitting
together under the cart-shed. For a minute he did not know what to do. Then he remembered the warm kindly face of his Uncle Bishop and the favourite phrase of his aunt, ‘Can't see nothing wrong in that boy, can you? I don' know! You'd give him your head if he asked for it', and he ran suddenly across the stack-yard, calling in a whisper who he was. ‘It's all right, it's me, it's Alexander', his heart bumping with guilt and excitement.

‘Be God, you'll git me hung,' his Uncle Bishop said.

‘Lucky for you y'aint in Kingdom Come,' Maxie said. ‘I was half a mind to shoot.'

‘Young gallus!' his uncle said. ‘Frightning folks to death.'

‘Can I stop?' Alexander said.

‘Looks as y're stopping,' Maxie said. ‘Jis be quiet. Y' oughta ding 'is ear,' he said to Uncle Bishop. ‘Too soft with 'im be 'arf.'

‘I told you they were coming,' Alexander said.

‘We don' know as they are coming,' Maxie said, ‘yit.'

For a long time nobody spoke again. The fields were dead silent all round the house and when Alexander looked out from the hovel he was so excited that he felt that the stars swung in their
courses over the straw-stacks and the trees. His hands trembled and he pressed them between his knees to quieten them. And then he heard something. It startled him by its closeness and familiarity: the clopping of Snowy's hoofs on the ground.

‘Where's Snowy?' he said.

‘In the stable,' Maxie said. ‘We shut him up so's they should think we'd really gone. See?'

‘Diddling 'em?'

‘Diddlin' 'em,' Maxie said. ‘Gotta be artful wi' gippos. Else they diddle you.'

They sat silent for a long time again, the night broken by no sound except the occasional clop of Snowy's hoofs and a brief whisking of wind stirring into the stacks and sometimes an odd sleepy murmur from the hens. A sort of drugged suspense took hold of Alexander, so that once he lost count of time and place and himself, as though he were asleep on his feet.

It was Maxie's voice that sprung him back to full consciousness and excitement. ‘Ain't that somebody moochin' about behind the pig-sties?'

‘Somebody or summat round there. Them 'ugs ain't rootlin' up for nothing.'

‘Listen! Somebody's comin' up round the back.'

Alexander and the two men sat tense, waiting. The boy could hear the sound of someone moving in the deep nettles and grass behind the pig-sties. The sound came nearer, was in the yard itself, was translated suddenly into moving figures. Maxie moved out of the hovel. The boy knelt on his hands and knees, clawing with his finger nails at a flint embedded in the dry earth, loosening it at last and weighing it in his hand. He felt astonishingly brave and angry and excited. Down across the yard there was a sound of wood being gently splintered: of the plank, as before, being prised out of the side of the locked hen-house. As he heard it he felt the pressure of his Uncle Bishop's hand against his chest, forcing him back a pace or two into the cart-shed. As he moved back he caught his heel against the lowered shaft of the pony cart and slipped. He groped wildly and fell against the side of the shed, the impact clattering the loose corrugated iron roof like a tin skeleton.