The Man on Horseback
The Man lived on a sprawling ranch of pastures and stretching fields of crops. They extended like the sea over the horizon. Small hills pushed up gently from the earth, timidly reaching towards the azure sky. They made the fields look like still waves stuck in time. Every day, the Man looked at the same hills and the same grain dancing daintily in the wind from one day to the next and was enraptured. The farmland was more home in his heart than the lonely house standing like an island paradise in the middle of acres of fields and thin tree lines that glowed ambers and greens that were even more striking than the impenetrable blue of the sea. So much so that he was as likely to fall asleep in the fresh tilled earth as in his feather bed.
The year was 1899. The Man’s farm was a unique relic among the others around him. One neighbour had a motorised plough, whose burning gas drifted over and defiled the fresh air on the Man’s farm. He hated its burning odour. Another neighbour used a machine to clear acres of field in a matter of hours. Its din permeated the land, vibrating out for miles in all directions. The Man knew when this neighbour was harvesting his field. He knew the running of the machine not by its racket, but by the eradication of the silent peace that covered his land. No refuge remained in his enclave of tradition, not in a world intent on progress.
As his grandfather and father had tilled the land in the same traditions and methods of so many before them, so too did the Man. His hands bore the marks of his hard work. The dirt under his nails could never fully be washed out, no matter how furiously he scrubbed them after every long day. His pride was steeled in the sweat dripping from his brow into the dirt by day, and in the water dripping through his rough, dirty, soap-covered fingers into the wash basin by night.
His neighbours, while not entirely pretentious or ostentatious people, made visibly more money than the Man did. They regularly cultivated, sowed, and harvested more land in less time. And while they were never long relieved of their obligation to devote some days to the earth and the beating sun, they could hire extra hands for busy periods. So what, the man thought. They were nothing but lazy entrepreneurs whose love of the Golden Calf of the Almighty Dollar strangled their love of their land, of their livestock, of their work–in the worst cases, of themselves or each other. He saw them as such, but he wasn’t sitting at their dinner tables. While he was a friendly enough neighbour to tip them his hat upon encounter, he never endeavoured to gain any insight into their lives.
Evenings after work, he built a fire in the wood stove to take in its heat after viewing the stars from his wooden veranda with a glass of whiskey to numb him to the cold of a night on the plains.
I would never give this up for anything, he thought as he stared deeply through the constellations, peering into shadows whose true depth could never be known. The crackle of the burning wood inside leapt through the log walls and the thin glass of the front window.
God himself couldn’t take me away from here.
It was a fine August day when the Man noticed the horse feed was low. He strapped a carriage to a mare with a bright brown mane that shimmered in the high summer sun. She was the steadiest of the man’s few horses. Riding around the pastures, she galloped sure-footedly, with a watchful eye on every unique undulation in the uneven land. Her sprint was as steady as her trot. The grace of her gallop was like watching a spirit dance through the ether. She rode him gently into town, taking him to a verily alien world.
The closer the Man got to town, the further he felt from anything familiar in the world of his farm. It wasn’t the women dressed in Parisian fabrics. It wasn’t the motorist zipping and buzzing past his carriage with such frightful speed. It was the ease with which they had abandoned the calm and easy world they had once known that seemed so foreign to the Man. A simple and predictable life, enthusiastically tossed aside in favour of one that seemed to move from moment to moment with the chaos of a smoke-filled field of battle.
The small town rose slowly over the horizon as the Man made his leisurely approach. The closer he got, the louder was the voice of the young boy selling newspapers in the thoroughfare. He shouted the news of the world to the passersby who were all more concerned with their own corners of the world. He sneered at the irony. Here was a world so connected by telegraph, train, and steamliner filled with self-absorbed people whose worlds revolved around such banalities as interior decoration and investments. He was glad to be on the outside. He was content to live beyond its clamour. The Man strode past the newspaper boy firm in the conviction that the stories of the world could wait for another time.
Still, his concerns were no less inwardly directed as anyone else’s. His world didn’t extend beyond his farm any more than his neighbours’ worlds stretched beyond new equipment to be purchased, or the townspeople’s extended beyond daily gossip. He would have loved to see himself above it. But he was among it. Everyone had their way of impressing their judgements of others and estimations of themselves onto the world. Theirs were advertised and unignorable. His were enclosed behind his moustachioed lip and searing eyes, ever kept to himself, but subtly giving themselves away now and again. And he knew it. He thrust himself into his small world with even greater intensity than anyone else threw themselves into their big new one.
He pulled up to the supply store and tied up the mare. He pulled his hat lower on his brow against the bright sun. Walking inside, he saw the familiar face of the shopkeeper. They shared a polite conversation while the Man helped the shopkeeper load his order into his cart. Having talked sweet nothings and being paid up, the Man and the shopkeeper shook hands and bid farewell.The unyielding passivity in the Man’s face was betrayed by the smallest grin as the Man thought about seeing his friend the next time he needed supplies.
The Man rode easily out of town, ready, but not hurrying, to leave. He couldn’t ignore the peculiar urban scent that hung in the air. It was filled with such a variety of smells: the ladies’ perfumes, the fresh cooked food emanating from the inn, horse manure on the town’s dirt roads. The wind blew through the town, channelled along the thoroughfare weaving between the wooden buildings mixing them all together and spreading them out. He longed to call forth the smell of wheat in the field, of bread temptingly reaching out from the kitchen in his home, of fresh cut firewood.
As he was about to ride past it, the man thought to stop at the post office. The building sat at the edge of town to greet and send off those who came and went. The Man was alarmed at the amount of mail he had received. He knew it had been some time since he had got the mail, but it had clearly been neglected longer than usual. The large stack of envelopes was imposing-- weeks of unacknowledged correspondence tied up in twine.
With a whip of the reins, the mare rode off and took the Man back home.
A sense of relief overtook him when his home returned to view. Old smells returned to him. The sight of outstretched farmland was most welcome. Wheat and barley interspersed with potatoes and sugarcane marked his return to something pacifying and familiar. The Man sat down at his table after fixing his afternoon coffee. The table, along with nearly everything else in the house, and the house itself, the man had built. A floor so flat a marble could sit perfectly still. A table that didn’t even presume to wobble.
He filed through the envelopes. Some letters, some serial offers, some bills. Another envelope marked itself alarmingly with the word “URGENT” upon its front with a return address to the bank.
He opened the letter. Upon reading it, his heart slowed to a halt. He stopped reading at the word “foreclosure” and stared through the paper into the floor. The nervous chill in his shallow breaths echoed in his ears. “God himself couldn’t take me away from here,” the man said solemnly to himself.
The hum of a machine at a neighbouring farm pierced the silence. For the first time, he wondered how much that diabolical contraption might cost.