Uncle Pat dropped the candle in surprise and joined me at the door, trying to shut it on the horse who was trying wildly to fit inside the frame, his wide girth only allowing him to come in halfway.
Ned covered his eyes and shrank to the floor while June scooped up the candle before it managed to catch on the nearby rug. Pat and I kept trying to slam the door in Nero’s face, something that, naturally, only made him angrier.
The sides of the doorframe began to crack under the horse’s pressure, the wood splintering. Between my uncle’s grunts, Ned’s childlike wails, and June’s quiet repetition of the Lord’s Prayer, I kept focused on Nero’s head. It should have bothered me to be beating a horse in such a way, but this was no horse. Its eyes were blood red and surrounded by yellow discharge; its mouth was a foaming, angry mess, and its only intent was to do what Ned had said. To kill him. To kill all of us. No, this was no horse. It barely even smelled like one. My father would have known what it was.
Finally, Pat and I made one powerful heave in unison, and the result appeared to shatter the bones in Nero’s once handsome head. He screamed, a mix of anguish and frustration, and then retreated, almost taking the door with him as he went. We slammed it shut and locked it, as if that would prevent Nero from coming in again.
“June!” Pat yelled. “Go wake up Rose!”
“I’m already here,” was his daughter’s reply. I looked to see Rose standing beside June, staring at us in horror.
He nodded, both of us keeping our bodies against the door. “Good, now go get the piano and move it over here. We have to make sure he doesn’t try and get in again.”
June and Rose scampered over to the grand piano that rested in the corner of the room. Rose loved to practice on it after dinner in the evenings, and you could see the reluctance on her fair face as she and her mother leaned against the piano and slowly pushed it toward us until it was in place.
We stepped back and watched the door carefully, our breaths held in our mouths, our fingers twitching nervously. The piano was barely moveable to June and Rose, but they were both small women and Nero was a thousand pound animal. He could easily destroy it in a few seconds.
We waited for a good few minutes, all of our ears tuned carefully, none of us making a sound. Even Ned had stopped his blubbering and was listening in between sniffs. Rose made her way to him and placed her arm gently around his shoulders. I breathed in deeply through my nose and closed my eyes, concentrating on the animal. I couldn’t smell him anymore.
He was gone.
“I don’t think he’s coming back,” I said quietly, my voice sounding deep in the stillness.
“How do you know that?” Pat asked scornfully. “Don’t tell me it’s your half-breed mumbo jumbo.”
That was precisely why, but of course I didn’t say that. I learned a long time ago that talking back to Uncle Pat got you nowhere, and if it did, it was usually a slap across the face.
Pat looked down at Ned on the floor, who was now staring mindlessly at his bloody hands, and calmly said, “Now Ned, let’s start from the beginning.”
“Yes,” I said. “What on earth were you feeding that thing?”
The next day was hot enough to make my thick braid stick to the back of my neck, taking more than a few minutes for the dry desert air to whisk away the sweat. Even then, I knew that it would be one of the last hot days in September. Autumn was at our doorstep and winter was lurking in the darkness behind it.
After the excitement and horror of last night, I was unable to go back to sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I’d see the wretched face of Nero trying to eat me alive, all red eyes and snapping muzzle. I’d never seen a horse behave like that in all the world, and the more I wanted to dwell on it, the more I ended up scaring myself. I wasn’t one to scare easily, either.
Unfortunately, as I helped Avery shovel manure from the pig’s pen, he kept bringing it up.
“So tell me again, what did the fella look like?” Avery asked, leaning on the end of his shovel, the sun glinting off his golden hair.
“Who? The horse or Ned?” I asked.
He smirked, his dimples coming out, and wiped his hand across his brow. “The horse, you old biddy. I know what Ned looks like. I know that weasel face anywhere.”
I glared at him playfully. “I think I might take offense to that old biddy comment. If I’m old at eighteen, then you must be ancient.”
He continued his smirk, which was always handsome and never mean-spirited. It was one of the reasons why I liked Avery so much. For the last five years, ever since Avery started working at Uncle Pat’s as a ranch hand, he’d been making my daily chores more bearable. In fact, I actually looked forward to them every day, except for Sundays when we were dragged off to church and seated on opposite sides of the aisle.
He was also one of the few people I could actually call my friend, someone who didn’t care what I looked like or what blood was in my body. When you grow up being half Indian and half white, you figure out pretty soon that you’re not really welcome anywhere. Ever since my pa died, I’d spent a lot of time trying to figure out where exactly I fit in. With Avery, none of it mattered. I was just Eve Smith.
“Fine,” he said. “But if you won’t spare me the details again, at least tell me what happened to Martha.”
I shrugged and tucked a few loose strands of hair behind my ears. I honestly didn’t know what had happened to Ned’s wife, though I was quite certain she was alive and well somewhere. She’d gone missing during the Nero incident and once daylight broke over the valley, Ned and my uncle went out in search of her. I knew I could have been of good use with my tracking skills but my uncle would have never…humored me like that. Regardless, I could sense that she was fine, out there alone and scared, but likely to find her way home eventually.
Though I thought this to myself, I didn’t say anything to Avery. I knew he wouldn’t think any less of me with my “half-breed mumbo jumbo” as my uncle said, but I never wanted to press my luck with him. He liked me and I never wanted to lose that.
“I’m sure Martha will turn up,” I said, and resumed shoveling the smelly manure, keeping focused on the task. I could sense he was studying me the way he often did when I tried to keep the native side of me quiet, and I hoped my cheeks weren’t burning red. If they were, I could blame it on the sun, not the fact that lately my thoughts about Avery were becoming more and more inappropriate.
Eventually, I dared to look at him. But instead of looking at me like I had assumed he was, his gaze was directed over the fence at the road where Rose was walking home from school, dust clouds rising up behind her like brown cotton. I felt a sharp pang of envy in my chest, something I often felt when I thought about my cousin. It wasn’t that she was beautiful and polite, but that she was able to go to school every day and I never was. That was the reason Avery had to teach me secretly a few times a week. When my father disappeared and my mother became little more than a mute, Uncle Pat ruled my life and he saw I was unfit to attend school with the proper folk.
All I’d ever wanted to do was learn, to fill my mind with knowledge and wisdom, while Rose seemed to abhor everything about learning, except when it came to the piano.
And now Rose had something else that I hadn’t—the rapt attention of Avery. Oh, I’d be fooling myself if I hadn’t picked up on it before, but I’d never seen him be so obvious about it.
I cleared my throat and that pang grew deeper when he didn’t break his stare. Rose, as usual, was completely oblivious to the fact that we were out in her farm, toiling away under the hot sun, let alone that Avery was eyeing her like a smartly-wrapped gift on Christmas Day. Rose was never mean or cruel, but the way she usually tolerated me was to pretend I didn’t exist.