The Boat in the Evening Read Free Page A

then giving in?
    *
    â€˜You heard me,’ he says, still on his knees at the horse’s feet.
    His tone is harsh. The distant echoes from heathen times thunder in his voice, making it like this, turning it to stone.
    The boy answers instantly: ‘Yes, I heard you.’
    â€˜Then come along !’
    â€˜All right.’
    *
    Why should it seem so difficult? It ought to be simple, surely, to give help to the lamed horse?
    The things you must do are usually possible.
    The impossible becomes real when you must.
    The impossible does not exist when you must.
    Anyone who knows so many secrets, who knows about the ring of animals, ought to be ashamed of himself.
    Yes, he is ashamed too, and comes wading across to the horse and his father. Burning, he kneels down and makes himself ready.
    There are three of them. There is nobody else. But all the same this is happening within the ring of animals, which only one of the three knows about.
    Close to the horse’s hoof.
    The horse droops his head as if dreaming about something, but it is the hurt and the throbbing that make the dumb animal behave this way. He lifts his hoof, standing on three legs, lifts his hoof high enough to raise the wound above the cold snow they are all standing in.
    The horse, large and helpless. Strong and utterly helpless, but together with man, trusting man in his hurt. Perhaps trusting completely in the unfledged being down in the snow beside the wound.
    Large or small, man must come to a painful wound.
    This is my song.
    Embarrassed and trembling beside the horse’s hoof.
    He wants to do as he is told, but cannot do a thing. He knows beforehand that he cannot, but he must pretend he can. He has a curious sensation: what seemed to be a dark wall opening—and his father stepping out of it to speak words of stone to his child. Stepping straight out of a black wall with strange advice that he himself could not follow.
    He failed himself, and turned his failure into words of stone to the frightened child. He stepped out of the stone wall like a barking dog, so that everything is doomed to failure.
    No use, in spite of centuries-old lore. Horse and man in isolation must help themselves when in pain. Old, black lore straight out of the wall. You cannot follow it when you are a child.
    This stern man has inherited it from down the centuries, and stands self-possessed, giving orders, beside his own defeat. He demands curtly, ‘Get on with it.’
    *
    Bitter moments. The child can do nothing either.
    He could have called to his father: Haven’t I sweated just as much as you today? And it would have been true, and reason enough.
    But he is silent for a different reason, one that goes deeper.
    The black command that came out of the wall of stone. It cannot be explained. He cannot perform. Not one miserable drop.
    A caustic look from the man above him rests on him and paralyses him so that he cannot move either. But nothing will come of this anyhow; the man’s caustic eye saw that in an instant.
    Miserably the child kneels in the snow beside the horse’s raised, smarting leg. The steel shoe glistens on his hoof from the trickling blood on the polished metal.
    Go on, shout out loud, he says to himself. Shout at him that he was no better. He was just as hopeless.
    No.
    You don’t shout such things out loud at a man such as this. You keep silent instead.
    Nothing but embarrassment within the wall of mist. Let me shout about something else that’s hidden from you, then: about the thousands of creatures who are switching their tails and standing so close together that the warmth passes from one to another. The creatures with their searching, uplifted muzzles. They will come running if I shout—because they are mine. There are so many of them that it would grow dark in the wood as if it were evening.
    Stupid thoughts flashing past. There are only three of them here. Only three, even if he were to shout until he burst.
    But he