Uchenna's Apples (14 page)

“No,” she said, as they made their way down the alley again, “I felt my phone go off just now: text from my Mom. Dinner’s early tonight, don’t ask me why…”

“Okay, see you later!”

She and Jimmy watched Emer go. “Look,” he said after a moment, gazing down toward the far end of the field in the direction of the horses, “… didn’t mean you were
really
a wagon.”

His annoyed tone almost kept Uchenna from realizing he was apologizing to her. She was tempted to grin at him, but instead did her best to keep her face straight: no point in letting him think he was off the hook right away. “Okay,” she said, “great. See you tomorrow morning.”

He nodded and headed off through the field, hands in his pockets, head a little down, looking like someone who was worried about being seen in the wrong place.
Have to find out what that’s about,
Uchenna thought, making her way through the hole in the wall and into the alley on the far side.
But not right now.
She headed back to the house, feeling all warm and excited with the idea that she was part of a Secret Plan.

*

Much later, Uchenna woke up in a bedroom so dim that it might still have been the middle of the night: except that the faint light from the window seemed wrong somehow, not the right color for the streetlights.
What time is it
? she wondered, and pulled her phone out from under her pillow.
Wow. Only five thirty—

She sat up in bed yawning and feeling worn out, for she’d had a hard time getting to sleep last night, thinking through all the details about how they were going to get the grass to the horses today. Yet now it was much too early to do anything but go back to sleep —

But the longer she lay there in the early dimness, the less she felt like staying in bed.
Eames got out to see them early yesterday morning,
Uchenna thought.
But the one thing I haven’t done is go to see them by myself.
And though the idea of being alone with the horses had freaked her out the other day, she was getting more used to them now.
And they’re getting more used to me, too, I bet,
she thought.
So why not? I’ll bring them some apples. They won’t bother chasing me anywhere if there’s something to eat.

She looked at the window. The dawn was just getting started, but it was unusually pale and chilly-looking. Very quietly Uchenna got out of bed, went to the window and peered through the blinds. Fog was everywhere: she was surprised to see how completely everything was hidden in it. In places the fog was actually so thick that it drifted by in yard-deep layers and wispy ribbons.
That is so cool!
she thought.
I have to get out in that!

Hurriedly she got dressed and threw on a jacket, pocketing her phone: then opened her bedroom door and stood there quietly for a moment, listening for any sound that her folks were awake. But everything was stillness. Uchenna tiptoed down the stairs, made for the back door, paused at the panel by the door to disable the alarm system, then silently undid the various locks and bolts and went out, locking up again behind her. Her Mam and Dad knew that she sometimes went out to the Back Office very early to read or do other private things, and they didn’t mind that.
So—
Uchenna slipped into the Back Office, turned on the table lamp and cracked the front window curtain a little so the light would show: then rummaged in the drawers of the old dresser for a plastic bag, and went out again, closing the door, to pick up some apples.

There were still a good number left over from what Emer had shaken down earlier. Once the bag was full, Uchenna looked up into the tree. The thought that her Mam didn’t want her out in the fields alone was on her mind, and she didn’t want to take the chance that any of the neighbors might see her going out the front way.

Uchenna took a deep breath, slipped the bag over her hand so it hung from her wrist, and started climbing the tree, going up the same way she’d gone with Emer. A couple of times she had to stop and just cling to the big branches until she got her breath back: the way the thinner branches bounced under her once or twice made her gasp and freeze. But eventually Uchenna made it up to that last branch where it was only a long step across to the wall: and then, with a deep breath, out to the wall itself.

There she had to sit down for a moment, her legs dangling over the other side, and recover her composure.
But that wasn’t as bad as last time,
she thought.
Maybe if I do this every day it won’t bother me any more.

Uchenna jumped down from the wall, coming down where they’d stomped the nettles down previously, and started making her way across the fields. It was amazing to her how slowly she had to go. The fog lay thick over everything, but not evenly. Here and there you could almost see through it, as if it was a misted-up window: elsewhere it was completely opaque like frosted glass. And the heavier mist sometimes moved in and left Uchenna suddenly uncertain which way she was going, so that she had to hold still and let that cloud or layer of it pass by.

But she knew pretty well where she was going, having been there twice already, and by taking her time Uchenna came at last without too much trouble to the Condom Ditch. On the far side of it, seemingly made louder by the fog, she could hear soft sounds of blowing and and the stamping of hooves.

Carefully Uchenna got through the hedge into the horses’ field. The fog was thick there, and the horses themselves, over at the other side of the field for the moment, were just indefinite shapes, patches of darkness and light. One patch, though, lighter than the others, started becoming more distinct. Uchenna realized that the Mammy Horse was coming toward her.

Uchenna’s first urge was to back up toward the hedge in case she needed to get out of there in a hurry. But the Mammy Horse wasn’t acting like anything was wrong: she was coming along so quietly and calmly that Uchenna suddenly felt it would be stupid to run away.

She stood where she was. Very slowly the Mammy Horse came along up to her. Once again Uchenna was struck by how big she was. But she also now saw much closer how very placid the Mammy Horse’s face looked, and she saw how the big pink nostrils flared to get a whiff of what Uchenna might be carrying. That big pale head came down right level with Uchenna’s face, the nose sniffing at the bag, but one huge brown eye looking straight into Uchenna’s: just looking. The hairy white ear on that side flicked toward Uchenna, flicked away.

“Here,” Uchenna said after a moment, and reached into the bag to get out an apple. The Mammy Horse reached right down to it, and Uchenna jumped a little to feel the horse’s big lips touch her hand: but they were just trying to figure out how to hold the apple. “Here, come on,” Uchenna said, and held the apple a little lower so that the Mammy Horse could get her teeth into it properly.

The Mammy Horse bit the apple, then took a step backward so she could lean her head up and work the apple around into the right position to be bitten in two.
Crunch!
—and the other half of it fell on the ground, while the Mammy stood there contentedly chewing the first half.

Uchenna reached out cautiously and put her hand on the Mammy Horse’s neck. The Mammy didn’t do anything but flick that ear at her again and keep on chewing.
This is so cool,
Uchenna thought. And at the same time it was both unbelievably strange, and strangely satisfying. Ireland was full of horses, everybody knew that: but until now they’d never meant anything in particular to Uchenna. And the apples—they’d just been something in the yard, a kind of theoretically edible fallout that she hadn’t paid any attention to unless windy weather came and apples banged down onto the Back Office’s ceiling. Now, though, the apples had become something completely different. And horses—

That brown eye was looking at her again: then the big head dipped to pick up the other half of the apple. Through the mist, other shapes were drifting closer now, their ears forward, inquisitive. All around her, the boyfriend horses and the Mammy’s friend became more distinct, making little whickering noises and looking a little suspiciously at Uchenna. She rolled them all apples, and soon the silence was full of crunching noises.

Somewhere far down the train line she could hear the long hoot of a train horn.
Even a train wouldn’t dare to go too fast in this,
Uchenna thought idly, peering past the horses at the ground. As she’d thought, there wasn’t a bit of yesterday’s grass left. “We’ll get you guys something pretty soon,” she said under her breath. But she was starting to get angry now.
Who just left you here like this and hasn’t brought you anything?
she thought.
Somebody should call the animal cruelty people or something.

But maybe somebody has. We could ask about it at school tomorrow. Anyway, no harm in feeding them today… and making a little money too.

Something touched Uchenna’s shoulder. She jumped. So did the black and white boyfriend horse that had nuzzled her, wanting another apple: he crowded back into two of his buddies who were standing too closely behind him, and for a few moments there was some pushing and shoving and tossing of heads and rolling of eyes, the horses’ ears laid back as they gave each other dirty looks. Uchenna was transfixed by panic, afraid that one of them would bash into her and knock her down: but the Mammy Horse just stood there placidly, munching away, and after a little the others quieted down and turned their attention back to Uchenna.

She threw them her last remaining apples, saving the very last one for the Mammy, who took it and bit it in half as she’d done with the last one. Uchenna went a little to one side of her and looked at the size of her belly.
It’s true what Emer said,
she thought:
she actually does look bigger. Maybe the baby horse has moved inside her?
Greatly daring, Uchenna reached out and ran a hand along the Mammy’s flank, toward the belly. The dirty white skin shivered a little, and the Mammy stamped a back foot, but not in annoyance, Uchenna thought.
If it
has
moved—does that mean she’s about to have it? She shouldn’t be out here like this—

But there was nothing she could do about it right now. Uchenna looked up through the mist and saw that the sky was very, very slightly starting to lighten above her: the sun was just starting to break through. Away past the train tracks she could see a faint bloom of light coming through the fog. “I’ve got to get back before anybody gets up and realizes I’m not home,” Uchenna said: and the Mammy looked at her mildly, swishing her long ivory-colored tail and flicking one ear again.

The boyfriend horses and Mammy’s girlfriend were starting to press in around Uchenna again, this time just out of curiosity. “No, go on,” she said, “I don’t have anything else. Go on! Shoo!” She waved her arms at them.

Much to her relief, they backed away, possibly more because of the rustling of the plastic bag in her hand than anything else. Uchenna turned and hurried back toward the hedge, understanding now what Emer had been feeling the other day: that these were
her
horses somehow, that she was responsible for them. It was a sudden weight on her spirit, that feeling: but as she got through the hole in the hedge and made her way across the Ditch and out into the Field of Dead Trolleys, Uchenna began to realize that, strangely, it was a weight she liked.

When she got home she realized she needn’t have hurried. It was at least two hours before her parents got up: her Mam first, as usual, to make some tea and start some sausages and bacon frying for her Dad: and then Dad himself, in his old beat-up white bathrobe, appearing in the kitchen and muttering, “Drugs, I need drugs…” It was a family joke, for the only drugs Uchenna’s Dad believed in were caffeine and alcohol (and not a lot of that). Now he took down the giant mug that some of his friends at Microsoft had brought him back from Munich, filled it with about a pint of hot tea, and took it into the living room to read the Irish Times online, the way he did every Sunday morning before they got the real newspaper on the way home from Mass.

Uchenna had some tea too, with a lot of milk in it, and looked up to find her Mam looking at her a little oddly. “Were you out this morning?” she said.

“Yes, Mam,” Uchenna said. “In the Back Office.” Which was true, as far as it went.

Her Mam nodded, yawned. “I thought I heard something,” she said. “Well, as long as you were all right.”

“I just woke up early…”

Her Mam nodded. “So,” she said to Uchenna’s Dad, “eleven o’clock Mass, or do you want to do earlier?”

A groan came from the living room. “All right, eleven…” Uchenna’s Mam said, glancing at the clock. “Go have your shower, sweet.” She sniffed. “You need it. Must be something left over from your hockey game…”

Uchenna nodded and went upstairs, making a note to herself:
Horses have a smell, and it rubs off. We have to be careful around them so our folks don’t figure out what’s going on…

She showered and dressed in good clothes—which for Sundays meant a skirt: other kids didn’t get so dressed up for church, but in this regard her Mam was distressingly old-fashioned.
Still, it’s only one day a week…
By quarter to eleven everybody was ready, and she and her Mam and Dad piled into the SUV and drove to church.

The church in Adamstown was just like the rest of the place—newly built and very modern, all glass and shining stone, bright and white inside. The church filled up with people, and Mass went exactly as it always did: the singing and the praying, the standing up and the kneeling down, the reciting responses to the prayers in unison. For Uchenna, it all went by more or less on autopilot, for her mind was elsewhere. “In the name of God the Father, and God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit…” the priest said, and Uchenna and all the people around her said “Amen”. But Uchenna looked up at the crucifix over the altar, from which hung a carved wooden God the Son Who looked more vaguely depressed than dead, and thought,
Yeah, GTS, what about it? What’re
You
doing about this situation?
For He’d been born in a stable: He should at least like horses a little.
I mean, didn’t you ride a mule into Jerusalem? Or a donkey. Whatever: close enough to horses. You wouldn’t be mean to a horse. Especially not a Mammy Horse. Come on now, make Yourself useful! You had a Mammy once!—
And Uchenna glanced over at the statue of the Blessed Virgin, who stood with folded hands and downcast eyes, seeming to look apologetically down on the snake she was standing on.