A Bandit's Tale Page 13

  “I don’t want them to trip,” she yelled into my ear once. “We can’t let them go down.”

  I nodded. Breathing was hard, talking harder. We had to go so slow. Time stopped. I wasn’t as cold and wet as yesterday, but I felt the storm pummeling and thrashing me, sucking every drop of energy and warmth out of my body. Soon I would be emptied out. Yesterday I’d been rowing across the Harlem River. Now I was following Meddlin’ Mary through deep snow. How had the weather—how had everything—changed so quickly?

  Once, I tripped, pulling down so hard on the reins I was afraid the horse would go down too. Luckily, he stood steady. I stopped to catch my breath, hiding my face against his neck. His mane was crusted hard with ice.

  “Good boy,” I told him. “Amore mio. You are a sweetheart. You won’t turn on me like Old Biter.”

  The street signs were mostly unreadable. After what seemed like hours, I looked up to see an L above me. I squinted and made out more letters: LEROY STREET. Were we close? At least Mary knew her way.

  A little while on, she waved her arm. Barrow Street. We had made it.

  —

  Mary’s father was waiting. Despite his sprained ankle, he’d cleared a narrow path from the street into the courtyard beyond the archway. He had also moved enough snow so we could open the stable door.

  Inside, the blacksmith took Mary’s horse from her, ordering her into the kitchen to change by the warm stove. Hobbling as best he could, he began brushing the worst of the snow from the animal’s legs.

  I’d been trying to do the same, but I couldn’t seem to get my body to do what my brain wanted. After a few minutes, the blacksmith grabbed my arm. He had tied the first horse and was holding out his hand to take the reins of mine.

  “Go get warm. I’ve got him,” he ordered. “I’ve put dry clothes by the stove in the kitchen. And there’s a pot of coffee. Drink a cup and change. Then come back fast as you can.”

  I did as he said, passing Mary on her way back, her hair in wild, loose curls, her cheeks raw and flaming. I could barely make my fingers work to undo the buttons on my shirt. My toes began to sting with pain as the warmth seeped through my socks.

  I was back in ten minutes. Mr. Hallanan was rubbing down the horse I’d led back, while Mary tended to the other. The horses looked miserable, their sides heaving. We worked on both animals for an hour or more, rubbing them with a currycomb, picking ice out of their hooves, walking them up and down.

  Every so often, the blacksmith would stop to feel their ears. “A horse’s ears shouldn’t be too cold or too hot. They’re getting back to normal.”

  Eventually we gave them some water and led them to the stalls Mary had made ready with fresh bedding. Mine whinnied softly and pushed his nose into my shoulder as if to thank me.

  As we set out the towels to dry near the potbellied stove in the stable, Mary told her father, “It wasn’t Max’s fault he couldn’t come back with us. He couldn’t let that boy die.”

  Mr. Hallanan had been angry when we returned alone. Now he sighed. “I understand. But this is the last time. We can’t save every horse in the city. I fear beasts and people both will lose their lives in this storm. It’s gotten worse every minute since you went out, and shows no sign of letting up.”

  “We did well, though, didn’t we?” Mary said happily, her cheeks still red.

  “Your mother would have been proud, darling.” Her father reached out and smoothed Mary’s flyaway curls.

  We were still for a moment. I thought about Mama, and my thoughts spilled out into words.

  “You were as strong as my mother, Mary,” I exclaimed without thinking, just the way Mama had always warned me about. “She used to carry heavy loads of firewood up the mountain, loads almost as heavy as ones a man could shoulder. Uh…well, I mean, that’s what my father said, anyway.”

  Mr. Hallanan flashed me a look but said nothing. I’d almost forgotten I’d said my mother died in childbirth.

  That’s the trouble with lies. Sometimes it’s hard to keep them straight.

  CHAPTER 23

  A short and slightly sentimental chapter introducing a horse

  One fall, when Anna and I were in the forest gathering firewood, we found a small bird. I couldn’t say what kind it was, and Mama didn’t recognize it either. She supposed it must have been blown off course by a storm. The little stranger lay on the ground, feathers ruffled, heart racing. Anna made soft noises, then cupped it in her hands and put it in the hollow of a tree.

  We never knew if the bird made it. But we were glad that at least it had a chance to rest peacefully. I felt much like that creature the rest of Blizzard Monday. I too had been blown off track, to some new and unfamiliar place. Still, for that afternoon, gazing out the window at the fierce and raging blizzard, I was safe. I didn’t have to scheme and plan about what to do next. I could just rest, dry and warm.

  Oh, we did move some, of course. All twelve stalls were full, so Mary and I had a lot of work to do. We checked on the horses often, especially the four we called the “storm horses.” All seemed well; they greeted us with gentle, contented whinnies and low, breathy, nickering snuffles.

  “They’re as happy to be inside as we are,” said Mary. “Aren’t you glad we rescued them, Rocco? I’m going to write our whole adventure down in my journal.”

  Mary Hallanan, it seemed, was a girl who loved stories.

  “I wasn’t scared even once,” she went on as we walked through the hall that led from the stable to the kitchen.

  “Not once?” I teased. She reminded me so much of Anna, who would never admit to being frightened of anything.

  “Well, yes, I was a little scared last night, especially when Da fell. Not today, though. I like walking in snow better than on ice.”

  Later she made a stew with beef, potatoes, onions, and carrots. Mr. Hallanan worked on polishing tack. I offered to help; he showed me how he liked it done, explaining how the various harnesses, bits, and bridles worked for different kinds of carts. As I cleaned and oiled a leather bridle, I was filled with a sense of comfort I couldn’t place at first. It was the feeling of being home.

  The blacksmith’s house was much grander than the two small rooms in Calvello where I’d grown up. Yet I didn’t feel too out of place. Maybe, I realized, because it was the only time since coming to America that I’d actually seen or been with a family. I suddenly missed my own family more than ever. Tears stung my eyes. I bit my lip, lowered my head, and cleared my throat.

  “You all right there, Rocco?” asked the blacksmith, shooting me one of his keen glances.

  I nodded wordlessly. It was too confusing to think about my family—how much I had disappointed Papa and Mama, my promise to Anna, what I could have done differently. It was confusing to think about a lot of things.

  Only one thought cheered me up: The city would be so busy shoveling out from the snow that one runaway from the House of Refuge might soon be forgotten.

  —

  “Tell you what I’d like, Mary darling,” the blacksmith said a while later, not taking his eyes off the soft leather he was oiling. “Why don’t you read to us from your favorite book? You might start at the beginning. I don’t expect Rocco’s ever heard it.”

  “Do you know Black Beauty?” Mary asked.

  I shook my head. I turned back to my work when she went to fetch the book, not able to look Mr. Hallanan in the eye. We sat in silence. The lies I had told him seemed to be piled up on the table between us, as solid as the objects we held in our hands.

  Mary was back in a minute, holding up a well-worn volume for me to see. “It’s called Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse, by Anna Sewell. It’s the only book she ever wrote.”

  “Autobiography?” I queried, repeating the unfamiliar word.

  “Autobiographies are stories people tell of their own lives. This one is Beauty’s story, as if he could write and talk,” she explained. “Of course, it’s just made-up.”

  Autobiography. This wa
s almost as astonishing as the snow outside. Someone—this person named Anna Sewell—had believed the story of a horse’s life was worth telling.

  Mary opened the book and held up the title page. “Black Beauty was published in London in 1877, about ten years ago. It begins with Beauty telling about his earliest memories.”

  Her father gave her an encouraging nod. “Go on, lass, I don’t tire of this story.”

  Mary began, reading the words as if she knew them by heart:

  “The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it. Some shady trees leaned over it, and rushes and water-lilies grew at the deep end. Over the hedge on one side we looked into a plowed field, and on the other we looked over a gate at our master’s house, which stood by the roadside; at the top of the meadow was a grove of fir trees, and at the bottom a running brook overhung by a steep bank.

  “While I was young I lived upon my mother’s milk, as I could not eat grass. In the daytime I ran by her side, and at night I lay down close by her. When it was hot we used to stand by the pond in the shade of the trees, and when it was cold we had a nice warm shed near the grove….”

  There was more. But after a while, though I wanted to keep listening, my head drooped on the table, and the bridle slipped from my fingers. The next thing I knew, the blacksmith was shaking me, urging me to take myself off to sleep in the stable.

  CHAPTER 24

  An interlude with horses; Mary imparts a lesson in meddling

  When I woke up Tuesday morning, I was sure the savage storm would be over. It wasn’t.

  We didn’t have much time to sit around and read Black Beauty, though. Before breakfast, Mr. Hallanan handed me a shovel and showed me what he wanted done. “If we don’t make a start on it now, we’ll never get out. Try to make a path from the street to the courtyard. The hardest part will be finding a place to pile the snow up.”

  After two hours, Mary banged on the window and motioned me in. I looked behind me. You could barely see any dent in the deep white covering. I’d have to do more later; it would take ages to make a path wide enough for a cart.

  Mr. Hallanan’s ankle was a little better, so he spent most of the day “puttering,” as he called it, in the stable and the blacksmith shop—moving tools around, cleaning, sorting nails and horseshoes into their correct trays (though it all looked perfectly neat and tidy to me).

  After shoveling, I worked in the stable with Mary. We mucked out stalls, fed and watered the horses, and gave each one a thorough brushing with the currycomb. Curious heads poked out of stall doors, and dark, liquid eyes followed our movements. I liked the smells of hay, oiled leather, and horse sweat. I didn’t even mind mucking out manure.

  These animals were patient creatures, at least compared to Old Biter, who kicked his stall door if I took too long to bring the hay. Of course, he wouldn’t be having that problem now: That sailor was probably feeding him plates piled with mountains of spaghetti.

  Mr. Hallanan hobbled in to check the condition of the four storm horses. He had us walk them back and forth so he could be sure they weren’t lame. Next he ran a practiced hand carefully over each, searching for signs of sores or ill treatment. The blacksmith brought Mary’s attention to the cart horse she’d led in the first night.

  “This mare is a bit underweight, I’d say. Give her some extra hay for now,” he instructed before leaving us to finish our work. “When the driver shows up, I’ll make him a deal on boarding them here he won’t be able to refuse. That way, we’ll be able to keep an eye on her.

  “I suppose I’m a meddler in my own way,” he chuckled.

  —

  “The horses like you. I think you’re a good stablegirl,” I told Mary. I’d been thinking that as I watched her sure, unhurried movements.

  She laughed. “I should be—I grew up in here. Da tells me that when I was little, I would cry unless he let me help with the horses. So he would sit me up on a stool so I could brush them. Only the old, gentle ones, of course. My mother called me the Stable Princess.”

  “Do you remember much about her?”

  “Just a little. She got consumption and died when I was four. Da says she helped make their dreams come true. They got married in Ireland and came here when she was only sixteen. She went to work in a factory to help Da start the business.

  “We think about her every day. I’m sorry about your mother, Rocco,” Mary added in a soft voice. “You must wish you had even one memory of her.”

  “It…it’s all right.” I was glad to bend over a broom so she couldn’t see my red face.

  Mary told me that her father had worked for someone else for several years, until her parents had earned enough to rent a small shop here on Barrow Street. Eventually he bought the house and the one next to it, turning it into the shop and stable he owned today.

  “Are all these horses yours?”

  “Oh, no! Only Sheridan, the old gelding in the back,” she said. “He was so broken down he was left for dead on the street, but my father nursed him back to health. The other horses board here; most are owned by cab or cart drivers.

  “Da comes from a long line of blacksmiths in Ireland. He knows as much about horses as anyone in the city,” she told me proudly as she filled a bucket with water from a tap near the stable door. Once Mary got started talking, you didn’t have to say much to keep her going.

  “That’s how we got to know Henry Bergh.”

  I thought about that first day, when I’d seen Mr. Bergh and Mary in action. I bit my tongue. Telling her that now would raise too many questions.

  “Mr. Bergh came to Da a few years ago to ask his advice about the design for the first horse ambulance for the society he founded—the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,” Mary went on.

  “An ambulance?”

  “A vehicle that transports injured horses off the streets so they can be cared for properly,” Mary explained, carrying her bucket to replenish the water trough in one of the stalls. “I remember that day Mr. Bergh came to visit. I was only eight. I’d just finished reading Black Beauty, and then here was a man who cared about helping horses as much as I did. And he was doing it!”

  I could imagine Mary peppering Mr. Bergh with questions. Mary was inside a stall now. I couldn’t see her face but she kept talking.

  “I love Black Beauty, but it’s just a story, of course. What matters is…I don’t know…what you do once the story is inside you.

  “In real life, horses don’t have voices.” Mary emerged, latching the stall door behind her and reaching up to stroke the nose of the horse inside. “We have to be their voices.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When we see cruel or unfair treatment, we have to speak up, because horses can’t do it for themselves. It’s not easy for me to stand up to strangers and ask them to get off a crowded bus or streetcar,” she admitted. “But Mr. Bergh always says that to make things change, you need a strong heart.”

  I stared down at the floor, the image of Luigi and Marco struggling to push their harp along the cobblestones clear in my mind. Street musicians didn’t have voices either.

  And what about Signor Ferri? What if I had been brave enough to really stand up to him?

  “It doesn’t seem like one person can do much, though,” I murmured.

  “You’re wrong, Rocco.” Mary looked right at me then, her brown eyes keen. “Think about it. Anna Sewell was one person. Mr. Bergh is just one person. But he started a whole society of people to help make things better, people who will carry on this work.”

  “He’s rich, though.”

  “You’re not rich, and you changed something,” she declared. “We both did. We saved those horses. And if we hadn’t been on that street yesterday, that boy Max took home might’ve died. We might not write a book or start a society, but we can do something. At least, we can try.”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t much like Mary.
I wasn’t brave, and I certainly didn’t have a strong heart. I was a liar, a bandit.

  As for the one time I had meddled—that night in Signor Ferri’s stable (which, I promise, I will give an account of quite soon)—well, that had only made me a castaway.

  I wondered what Mary Hallanan would do if she knew the truth about me.

  Credit p4.1

  Credit p4.2

  With appetite ground to keenest edge by a hunger that is never fed, the children of the poor grow up in joyless homes to lives of wearisome toil that claims them at an age when the play of their happier fellows has but just begun. Has a yard of turf been laid and a vine been coaxed to grow within their reach, they are banished and barred out from it as from a heaven that is not for such as they.

  I came upon a couple of youngsters in a Mulberry Street yard a while ago that were chalking on the fence their first lesson in “writin’.” And this is what they wrote: “Keeb of te Grass.” They had it by heart, for there was not, I verily believe, a green sod within a quarter of a mile. Home to them is an empty name. Pleasure? A gentleman once catechized a ragged class in a down-town public school on this point, and recorded the result: Out of forty-eight boys twenty had never seen the Brooklyn Bridge that was scarcely five minutes’ walk away, three only had been in Central Park, fifteen had known the joy of a ride in a horse-car.

  The street, with its ash-barrels and its dirt, the river that runs foul with mud, are their domain.

  —JACOB RIIS, How the Other Half Lives

  Credit p4.3

  CHAPTER 25

  I meet other meddlers and make a speech

  On Wednesday morning, the city began digging out. I was up at five to do more shoveling. Later the skies cleared and the sun came out. Spring had decided to return. The snow would melt eventually, but not right away—there was simply too much of it.