He’d seen men blown to bits, shot to pieces, hung up in barbed wire with rats eating them. Wounded men crawling. Where did they think they were going? They were trying to drag themselves away from the pain. Men could die in more ways than he’d thought.
Once a riderless horse had run into the hangar at their aerodrome from God knows where, dreadfully burned, perhaps mistaking the structure for a barn. They’d shot the poor thing to put it out of its misery.
“One time,” Felix said, “I was shooting at a German and his engine caught fire, so he climbed out onto the wing and jumped. He was wearing a huge brown fur coat and looked like a bear falling through the sky. He had no parachute. He’d decided he’d rather fall than burn. I might have done the same. His plane flew on for a bit without him, burning, then broke apart.” Unobtrusively, Wallace refilled Felix’s glass. “Still,” Felix said, raising it, “I’d take all that over what Lindbergh’s gotten himself into.”
* * *
—
The Brayfogles chose the cottage and its single bed over the sleeping porch. After dinner, Caleb went off into the night, and Jamie and Marian were sent upstairs to make themselves scarce. They knelt together on Marian’s bed, a russet-colored coonhound asleep at the foot, and watched out the window as Felix sat on Fiddler’s fence and smoked in the twilight. When the gelding strolled over, the man extended a hand, stroked the old horse’s cheek.
“Imagine having an airplane and being able to go wherever you want,” she said.
“Why did he have to tell us about that burned horse?” Jamie said.
Usually Jamie’s presence gave Marian a sense of symmetry and rightness, of having been properly balanced. Without him she was like a too-light canoe, at the mercy of the current. He was the calmer one, less impulsive. Ballast. He was not exactly part of her, but he was not entirely other, either, not like Wallace or Caleb or Berit or anyone else.
But in this moment, she wished him impatiently away. She didn’t want to think about the burned horse, only about Felix.
“There’s nothing you can do for it now. Don’t think about it.”
“Do you know,” he said with vehemence, “that sometimes I wish people didn’t exist? I really do.”
“People died, too,” Marian said. She stroked the sleeping dog, who stirred and uncurled onto her side, lifting a leg to show her belly. “Millions of them, wasn’t it?”
“But the horses didn’t understand what any of it was for.”
For Jamie, there was little solace in watching his own horse stand outside in the pleasant evening, leading a comfortable life, because he could imagine all too clearly Fiddler’s panic and confusion if he were to be set on fire, if he ran from the pain but could not escape it.
Marian, still gazing at Felix, said, “I wonder why he married her, though. She’s not very nice.”
“I don’t care,” Jamie said. “We’ll never see them again.”
The world out the window—the tidy barn and cottage, the opalescent sky—struck Jamie as an illusion, a perfidious veil beneath which roiled suffering and death. That Marian did not see as he saw, that she only rested her chin on her fist on the sill and stared moonily down at a stranger and dreamed of flying away from their house where they were safe together, made him feel terribly alone.
He said good night and went to his room, the coonhound following. The dog jumped up onto his bed, circled, and settled. Everything in the shape of the animal commanded love: her long soft ears, the black hairs mingled with the red on her flanks, the way she slung the tip of her tail cozily over her nose. He could not make peace with the magnitude of suffering in the world. It registered in him as a wave of heat and tingling, an acceleration in his heart and a lightness in his head—a sensation both puny and unbearable. The only way to live was to shut it out, but even when he turned his thoughts away, he was still aware of it, as one who lives alongside a levee is aware of the deluge waiting on the other side.
To soothe himself, he took his sketchbook from under his pillow, sat cross-legged, and began to draw the dog.
* * *
—
Marian lay down in bed but wasn’t ready to sleep. She thought of Felix, turned over her collection of memories from the day: his tan forearms and calloused hands, his soapy smell after his bath, his shoulders under her thighs. There was a pressure between her legs. She ground the heel of her hand there, was startled by the way a ball of sparks burst loose inside her like a blown dandelion puff.