Free The Man Who Walked Away A Novel by Maud Casey Page A

mud holds the horse fast, sucking it down. Kicking and beating are of no use and the rider is forced to leap off, to watch helplessly as the horse sinks up to its chest, its neck thrashing. Albert watches with the rider, who weeps as the horse thrashes and squeals until mud fills its nostrils and its mouth, until it is too tired to squeal. The horse’s eyes stop rolling back in its head; they go still with hopelessness. It is better not to thrash , the eyes say.
    Several men happen by in a carriage; with a rope they help the weeping rider drag the enormous body of the horse out of the sucking mud. After everyone has gone, Albert watches the still surface as though something might rise up out of it. It is better not to thrash. He is thick and deaf with sludge. He doesn’t care anymore if the urge to walk comes or not. He is a shrouded version of a man who will leave behind only his simple, heavy body to be carried away. If he doesn’t thrash, will someone carry him away, out of this life?
    But when he finds himself in a shambles of a public square—not even a monument to such-and-such general—he has not been carried away, not at all. He is still himself, though he seems to be disappearing with greater frequency. How could he ever be sure, but it seems as if he is himself less and less. It is a town so poor the people wear vests with old coins for buttons and hats of worn black felt. Some people have no shoes at all. A large greatcoat covers their misery.
    “Would you like something to eat?” a child with a dirt-streaked face asks Albert, holding out a fat-fried potato in his pudgy hand. Nearby, his mother hangs clothes on a line. “He’ll come back,” she says through the clothespin between her teeth. She is speaking to her friend whose husband has gone on another bender.
    “Or maybe he won’t,” the other woman says, “I should be so lucky.” The way she laughs, Albert knows she doesn’t mean it. There may be misery here, but every morning these women wake up into a family of the sort he will never have. To have a family requires being in one place. You cannot be the sort of man who ends up in Verdun with the echo of sheep bells in your head when you were meant to meet a woman who said she wanted to marry you at four o’clock somewhere else entirely.
    “Would you like a potato?” the boy says, his hand still outstretched.
    The boy’s kindness is more than Albert can bear. Better that the woman hanging clothes should run him off or have him thrown in jail. Better to tell him he is not fulfilling his duties as a citizen, to accuse him of causing the nation’s downfall.
    What about love? It is somewhere else. Not for him. Never for him.
    He wiggles his toe through the rustling leaves in his shoes. He hopes the child will understand.
    Understand what? What day? What gift?
    What was the question?
    There is no explaining, so he does the only thing he knows how to do. Though his legs ache, though all he wants is to stop, he walks away.
    “Wait!” the child calls after him. “Come back! I can make it smaller. I will cut it in half.” The boy hurls the fat-fried potato after him in frustration. He was being kind the way his mother always told him to be. Why wouldn’t this man receive his kindness? A bird, startled out of a holm oak, swoops down to where the potato lies in the dirt, spears it with its beak, and flies away.
    “Come back!” cries the boy, a tug in his stomach. He is filled with a powerful longing he doesn’t understand. He wants the man who is walking away to turn around more fiercely than he has wanted anything in his short life, but the man only becomes smaller and smaller and smaller.
    “Stop your shouting,” his mother shouts, and though the boy will eventually stop his shouting, though he will return to playing games—stealing his father’s worn felt hat and dropping it down the well, for example—for days he will think about the man disappearing over the horizon. The boy’s heart