Melpomene’s Garden
The horse’s eye was wide with terror. Lauren knelt with one knee pressing the horse’s heaving neck into the mud while the veterinarian, with her strong, sure fingers, probed along the horse’s jaw up to its trachea.
“Hold her still,” the vet admonished Lauren sternly, “you’ve got to keep her from hurting herself.”
Lauren exerted more pressure on the horse’s neck, until the frantic animal could no longer thrash. Lauren knew only the eyes of her grandfather’s horses, all liquid brown and long-lashed as the animals nuzzled sugar from her flat palm. This eye, though brown, was ringed with panicked white, and Lauren was frightened. She turned her head and brushed sandy mud from the great muscle that swelled above the horse’s foreleg. Lauren smoothed the short, silky coat so she would not have to see.
“That’s right, calm her down,” the vet said, quiet now, her voice soothing, “I think this old girl only had a scare.”
Lauren looked up from the frightened beast, across a hundred yards of mud where other horses either struggled to extract themselves or lay motionless. In places, only legs and hooves protruded above the silt. Lauren realized that, only an hour before, this must have been a grassy meadow. Now it was an expanse of mud. A wide freshet, red, the color of clay, streamed down the middle, shallow enough to wade. Lauren looked behind her, at the school van, its doors flung open, ten feet from where the road disappeared beneath the shining silt. An hour before she had been on a field trip with her journalism class to observe the news teams covering the flood. Now they were all volunteers.
“This isn’t the main deluge,” Mr. Harris, her journalism teacher, shouted at his students, waving them to circle him, “This is just a horse pond that gave way on the side of that hill.”
Lauren stayed with the frightened mare even though the vet had moved on to another animal. Lauren stroked the wide, muscular neck, and, under her touch, the horse calmed, the eye half-closed.
“Find out the topography,” Mr. Harris yelled, gesticulating at the countryside, “interview any of these locals to get a description of the pond before it came down. Remember what the first news crew said about soil saturation this morning. This pond came down from the dam side being saturated with all the rain, not from the pressure of current. Find out how big the pond was. It must have been a pretty good size. See if you can find out in surface acres. Find out where the horse barn used to be. Estimate distances.”
Lauren sat down hard in the mud when the chestnut mare suddenly struggled to her feet, and Lauren scrambled backward, expecting the horse to bolt. But the mare took a shaky step toward Lauren and nuzzled her long hair. When Lauren rose to join Mr. Harris, the mare nipped at her shoulder.
“See if you can find the owner of the horses,” Mr. Harris continued, “ Get a head count. See how many animals were killed, how many are going to have to be destroyed.”
When two boys from her class ran past her and the mare, the horse nudged its long head under Lauren’s arm until she held the mare across its withers. The mare kept its head bent to nuzzle at Lauren’s other hand.
“If you aren’t trying to get an interview, come with me in the van. We’re going to drive back up the road to that store and phone in the story to the paper. We’ve scooped the big boys on this one. We got lucky.”
Mr. Harris jogged across the mud toward the van, a broad smile across his face. Lauren was giving the horse a final stroke when a terrified whinny from across the field spooked the mare, and Lauren was jerked off the ground. Lauren fell at the mare’s feet, and the horse shied away, its eye dilated with panic again. Mr. Harris was already starting the van motor. Lauren looked back across the mud to see the vet struggling with a huge black stallion, huge even buried to its flanks in the silt. Lauren struggled to her feet and raced to where the giant horse labored to free itself.
“Hold his head still,” the vet commanded.
Lauren straddled the stallion’s withers, her feet barely touching the ground even though the mud was to his shoulders. She leaned forward and took the massive neck in both arms, her face buried in his mane. The stallion thrashed and violently shook his head so that Lauren’s face banged the bony point between his ears. Lauren felt her lip fatten, and her chin grew raw from the friction of his mane. Lauren hugged the great head as tightly as she could, pressing her cheek against one silken ear.
“Good,” the vet panted as she tried to grasp his lower lip, “hold him tight.”
The stallion continued to pitch his head from side to side, but Lauren held on like death. She could feel the supple spine and engorged muscles working between her thighs where she hugged him with her legs. She could feel each ragged whinny in the hollow of her chest, vibrate through the air in her own lungs. Lauren held him until he began to tire, and the vet, loosening Lauren’s grip from around his neck, slid Lauren’s hands down over the stallion’s eyes. The huge horse quieted, and his long lashes tickled Lauren’s cupped palms as he blinked. The vet skinned off her windbreaker and draped it over his forelock.
“This will make a better blinder.”
The stallion relaxed in Lauren’s grasp, and the huge head sank until his nostrils flared in the soft mud. Now it was Lauren who struggled to move the stallion. She cradled his head with both arms wrapped around his neck, her cheek resting on the windbreaker covering his eyes. Her back began to ache from leaning forward, holding the weight of the stallion’s long head. She straddled him stiff-legged, and the back of her knees tightened and went numb. But the vet had rounded up a few men, and they began to dig out the animal with shovels, garden trowels, their bare hands, anything available. One man scraped back the silt with a board from the horse barn, and he was the first to unearth the stallion’s left hock. When blood began to ooze up through the sotted soil, he discarded his board and dug with his hands too.
“Be careful,” the vet warned Lauren, “when he starts feeling like he can get loose from the mud, he might start thrashing again.”
But the stallion let his head remain limp in Lauren’s aching arms. She cradled his throat in crook of her left arm, and, when that arm began to quiver with fatigue, she switched to her right arm. With her free hand, she stroked the huge beast, starting with his muddy nose, and then dropped her hand under his chin to smooth the loose skin there.
“Hey, doc,” the man who discarded the board said, “come take a look at this.”
The vet disappeared from Lauren’s view, and, because of her struggle to hold the stallion, Lauren could not turn to see what the vet studied. There was a long silence. Then Lauren heard a wet slap across the stallion’s flank, but the horse remained limp in her arms. Lauren didn’t feel the stallion so much as flinch.
“Okay, go ahead and do it,” the vet said after another silence.
Lauren felt the vet’s hand on her shoulder.
“C’mon, honey. Lay him down.”
Lauren suddenly realized what decision had been made, and she hugged the stallion with both arms, pressed her cheek into his long mane.
“C’mon, darlin’, we can’t help him any more.”
Lauren hugged the huge head even tighter, felt one tear burn as it rolled down her cheek. A rough hand grabbed Lauren by the back of her belt and lifted her from the stallion. The horse’s head dropped, muzzle-first into the soft mud, and Lauren saw the black barrel of a rifle swing up to the place where she had pressed her face against the stallion’s silky ear. Lauren, struggling against the force that dragged her from the horse, cried out, and, at the sound of her voice, the black stallion, though blinded, raised its head from the silt and cocked its ears. Lauren spun to loose herself and sprawled flat in the slick silt. Before she could turn back to the stallion, a rifle crack split the air, the sharp concussion pressed her eardrums, the echo rang in her head. Lauren scrabbled to her feet, without looking back, and ran through the shallow freshet, across the mud and into the shade of the trees. She ran into the forest, stumbling and swatting branches as they clawed at her face, and, finally, collapsed at the edge of a small glen, because the running and the sobbing would not let her breathe.
When the jerking spasms of her sobbing subsided, and the canopied green of the glen sharpened out of blur when she blotted away her tears with her shirttail, Lauren became aware of a house at the other end of the clearing. Lauren hoped there was a telephone there, so she could call home, have her mother come to pick her up. There must be a road, Lauren reasoned, on the other side of the house, and she was relieved. She did not want to have to cross the washout again. Lauren picked herself up from the moss and moldy leaves and waded through the waist-high ferns to the door of the house, which was open.
“Hello,” Lauren called into the house.
The house, Lauren noticed, was tidy and well-kept for a structure that seemed to have sprouted, like the ferns, from the mossy floor of the glen. Although Lauren stood before the front door, on a wide flagstone at the bottom of the small porch’s two stone steps, she could see no path that led here. She turned in a circle and saw that even the ferns she had trampled to get here had sprung back, giving no indication of her passing. Lush vegetation grew right up to the house’s foundation, and the house rose two stories up into the shady green of the trees’ canopy. The house, Lauren guessed, was of Victorian design because the porch railings, the shutters, and the eaves, high in the green shadows, were webbed with fancy scrollwork.
“Hello, anybody home?” Lauren called again through the open door.
But still there was no response. Maybe, thought Lauren, whoever lived here had heard the commotion of the flood and had gone to help out. Lauren strained her ears to listen for any sound from the house, but her head still rang from the rifle’s blast. Lauren climbed the steps and walked through the door, stopping just past the threshold. She was in a long hall that went to the back of the house. At the hall’s other end, through the open rectangle of the back door, Lauren could see more abundant green, and flowers, a lavish confusion of color and shadow. To Lauren’s right, a doorway led into a wall-papered room. Still straining to listen, Lauren ventured inside. Lauren immediately noticed the odd arrangement of the furniture: an overstuffed sofa and chairs, a coffee table with carved legs and marquetted top, an imposing armoire, all pushed to the center of the room and arranged there. The perimeter of the room was bare. No furniture was against the papered walls. Lauren, in her search for a telephone, circumnavigated the room at its outside edge, ending back at the doorway. Although she had seen no phone in her tour of the room, she had noticed, as she had circled and her eyes grew accustomed to the muted light from the draped window, that the flowered wallpaper was worn in a strange pattern. At shoulder height, all the way around the room, the paper was faded in a line a few inches high. Lauren turned to examine the wall beside the doorway, and she could see that the wallpaper, where there was no pattern, was beginning to show white. Where the line crossed over a printed flower, the design paled. Lauren stepped back into the hallway, and, although the hall was painted, she could detect the worn line where it had dulled the enamel’s gloss.
“Do you have a telephone I could use?” Lauren called up the stairway.
The strange house was silent. Lauren continued down the hallway, to the next open door, on her left, beneath the carved staircase. In this room, the peculiar worn place was strikingly clear. The wallpaper was a floral design with chrysanthemum and peony blossoms raised in faux velvet on a ribbed satin field. Where the line circled the room at shoulder height, the nappy raised blooms had been worn as flat as the satin background, and as shiny. Again, no furniture encumbered the walls, and, in the center of the room, on carved marble pedestals, gathered the mute busts of men and women, mingling as at a disembodied dinner party. Lauren thought she recognized some of the statues. Was that Hamlet proffering Yorick’s skull? Was the young girl who stared wistfully out of the half-draped window Anne Frank? Lauren walked into the frozen crowd and put her own face near the cold, marble ones. Each bust was dustless, immaculate. Each glowed with a filmy patina, as though polished by a person’s palm.
From upstairs, Lauren heard a voice, a woman’s voice, clear, coquettish, rhythmic, as if she were singing, or reciting. Lauren scampered back into the hallway, out from under the staircase, and craned her head up to glimpse a young woman descending the stairs. She wore a long gown, and, instead of holding the rail, she ran her fingers lightly across the wall, at shoulder height. Lauren tried to speak, but she panicked, caught in this woman’s house like a burglar. Lauren watched her dismount the staircase and run her hand along the wall until reached the open front door. The woman stopped and reached out for the opposite wall, placing her fingers on the worn spot, and then she turned and faced Lauren.
“I’m sorry,” Lauren blurted, “I’m trying to find a telephone. I didn’t know that anyone was home. The door was open...”
The young woman, her eyes closed, her pretty mouth downturned in an expression of exquisite sadness, made no response to Lauren’s confession. Instead, she turned and entered the first room Lauren had explored. Lauren took a hesitant step down the hall, to follow her, when she heard the woman’s voice, clear and melodious, resonate out into the hallway.
“The dying nightingale will cry tonight, its mournful song will echo through the glen. Then day will shaft its warmth down through the leaves, and silence her, her song lost like the night.”
Lauren stepped into the doorway and watched the woman circle the room, her slender fingers gliding along the wall. Although the woman was silent now, the dying utterance of her words seemed to hover in the air, a sound like a wet fingertip circling the rim of a crystal goblet. The woman brushed past Lauren as she returned to trace her way down the hallway, and her long gown, as it billowed and slid past Lauren’s fisted hands, was as soft as the stallion’s ears. Lauren began to feel a deep pity well within her, as though the satiny touch of the gown had irritated a tender part of her soul, a part that yearned for things lost.
“From marble, I will fashion ornate vessels, to hold her vanished song, its liquid shape. And when the night returns, but she is gone, then I can drink from her exquisite sadness.”
The alluring voice, with its crystal, lingering afternote, flowed out from the bust room, and Lauren moved toward it, with delicious slowness, down the hallway, as though she pressed through the delicate mass of a thousand hanging silken scarves.
“But can that quaff, so bittersweet, replace my nightingale, her quickened, feathered heart? No, no, this potion cannot sate my thirst. My vessel empties and my mouth is dry.”
From the doorway, Lauren watched the young woman kneel in the center of the statues, her gown spread around her in soft heaps and folds. She caressed a sculpture which Lauren had not noticed before, a green marble carving of a stallion rearing, mane flying, hooves clawing.
“My child, is it the nightingale I miss? Is it her absence that has saddened me? Or is it me I suffer for, alone, bereft, and silent in the empty night?”
The woman turned her face to Lauren and opened her cataracted eyes. In a single, fluid motion, she rose through the mute assemblage, her arms outstretched, and cradled Lauren’s face in her soft hands.
“The things we love and lose live on in us. Forget yourself, and you can give them life.”
The woman took Lauren’s hand and led her to the back door. There was no road, as Lauren had expected, but a riotous garden. The sun’s rays slanted steeply through the green canopy as evening deepened, and Lauren descended the steps into the middle of the crimsons and mauves, the feathery golden petals of sunflowers and susans. Lauren looked back over her shoulder, but the doorway was empty. From somewhere in the house, Lauren could hear the melodious voice, its crystalline echo. Lauren moved through the nodding blossoms as though she were wading transparent, tingling water, the ghost of a deluge. She became aware of the rhythmic plod of her heart, and then sound resonated outside of her, faster, a distant gallop. The muffled beat of hooves on moss grew closer, filled up her chest. From the other side of a cloud of honeysuckle, a black stallion shouldered through the sweet-tongued blooms and snorted, his long-lashed eye half-closed and liquid brown. In the midst of the colorful rabble of flowers and the heady, perfumed air, he lowered his head to let Lauren stroke his porcelain horn.