Free The Lime Twig by John Hawkes Page B

wanted an old woman’s milk to drink—then disappeared. It was gone and she thought it had left her in search of the whispering tongue of some old woman in a country cottage. So she stood, picked up the dish, made her way toward the smells of yellow soap and blackened stove. There was a bulb in the kitchen. But the bulb was bleak, it spoiled the brown wood, the sink, the cupboard doors which she had covered with blue curtains. She washed the cat’s dish in the dark, lit the stove in the dark. For a moment, before the match flame caught at thesooted jets, she smelled the cold endless odor of greasy gas and her heart commenced suddenly to beat.
    “Michael. Michael, is it you?”
    But she turned, struck a second match, and the gas flames puffed up from the pipe in a circle like tiny blue teeth round the rim of a coronet and she herself was plain, only a girl who could cook, clean, sing a little. And then, in the light of the gas, she saw a stableboy’s thin face and, outside, the mortuary bells were ringing.
    …
The thin face of a pike and dirty hands—not black by earth, soot, or grease, but the soiled tan color of hands perpetually rubbing down a horse’s skin—and wearing riding trousers of twill but no socks, and from the belt up, naked
.
    “Now then, Mr. Hencher’s with the horse, is that it?”
    Together they walk in the direction of the stalls, passing a shovel in an iron wheelbarrow, a saddle pad covered with black flies, a whip leaning against a whited post. Over one stall, on a rusty nail, hangs a jockey’s faded green-and-yellow cap.
    They continue and from the rotted wood in the eaves overhead comes the sound, compact, malcontent, of a hive of bees stinging to death a sparrow. And the stable-boy, treading hay wisps and manure between his shoes and the stones, points to the closed stalls and tells him of Princess Pat, Islam, Dead-at-Night, the few mares and stallions within. And he hears them paw the dark, hears the slow scraping of four pointed hoofs.
    “Smoke, Mr. Banks? I’ll just have a drag or two before I go back in with him.”
    A growth of wild prickly briar climbs one side of the stall. There are no sounds within. Michael steps away, draws in his cuff, stares at the double doors—while the stableboy shoots back the bolt, slips inside. The horse stands head to the rear wall, and first he sees the streaks of the animal’s buttocks, the high point that descends to the back. Then he sees the polished outline of the legs. Then the tail.
    And at the same moment, under the tail’s heavy and graying gall, and between the hind legs, he sees Hencher’s outstretched body and, nearest himself, the inert shoes, toes down.
    “How do you like him, Mr. Banks? Fine horse, eh?”
    “Hencher,” he whispers, “here’s Hencher!”
    Together they will bury Hencher with handfuls of straw, bolt the doors, wipe their hands, and for himself there will be no cod or beef at six, no kissing her at six, no going home—not with Hencher kicked to death by the horse. And forward in the dark the neck is lowered and he sees the head briefly as it swings sideways at the level of the front hoofs with ears drawn back and great honey-colored eyes floating out to him.
    She heard the distant mortuary bells. Outside, over all this part of the city, returning fathers were using their weary keys. It was time to feed the cats, the dogs, the little broken dolls. It was never luck she felt, butMargaret waited, standing beside the coal grate in which they built no fire, waited for him to hang up his hat, untie her apron strings. When Banks had first kissed her, touching the arm that was only an arm, the cheek that was only a cheek, he had turned away to find a hair in his mouth.
    Feeling lucky?
    In how many minutes now she would nod, smile again, sit across from him and hold her pencil and the evening five-pound crostic, she wearing no rings except the wedding band and, in her otherwise straight brown hair, touching the single deep