“Okay.”
“Leave an inch below the knee.”
“Okay.”
“It’s got to be loose enough to put a finger in the top.”
“Sean Kendrick.” I say it emphatically enough that the stallion’s ears prick toward me. I preferred when he didn’t notice me. His attention reminds me of the black capall uisce that found Finn and me in the lean-to.
Sean doesn’t appear to be at all apologetic. “I think you’d better let me do it after all.”
“You’re the one who had me in here in the first place,” I say. “Now I think it’s you who doesn’t trust me.”
“It’s not just you,” he replies.
I glower at him. “Well, I tell you what. I’ll hold him and you wrap. That way, when it’s done wrong, there’s only yourself to slap. And take your jacket. I’m tired of holding it.”
Sean’s look is appraising, as if he’s trying to decide if I really mean it. Or maybe he’s just trying to decide if I’m capable.
“All right,” he says. He holds a hand in front of Corr’s face like a warning. We trade — with his other hand, he takes his jacket and I take the lead. He shrugs the jacket on, suddenly and magically becoming the Sean Kendrick I saw in the butcher shop as he does. He says, “The teeth are what to watch.”
My tone comes out unintentionally bitter. “I saw.”
“That wasn’t Corr,” Sean says. “You have to know them. You only use what you need. You can’t just hang every bell in Thisby on every horse in the sea. They react differently. They aren’t machines.”
“So you’re saying David Prince would still be alive if you’d been on Corr?” But it’s a question that we both already know the answer to, so I ask, “Why?”
Sean ducks by Corr’s leg, sliding his hand down it so that the stallion knows he’s there. “Don’t you know when your mare is anxious?”
Of course I do. I’ve grown up on her back and by her side. I know when she’s unhappy sure as she knows when I am.
I ask, “Did you un-quit?”
I glance up as the lights switch on in the barn, filling the stall with a yellow glow that doesn’t quite reach the floor. Sean’s much faster with the wrap now. He works steadily without stopping to spit, so that must’ve been something to keep Corr standing still while he had no one to hold him. Is there no one in this fancy barn who would hold Corr while Sean worked? All this time, Corr’s been standing sweet as a sheep, though his eyes are canny as a goat’s. Sean doesn’t look up when he replies. “Malvern told me I could buy Corr from him if I won.”
“Is that un-quitting?”
“Yes.”
“What about if you don’t win?”
Sean looks up at me. “What if you don’t?”
I don’t want to answer, so instead I fire back, “What will you do if you win?”
He’s done with the wrap, but he stays crouched by Corr’s leg. “With my savings and my part of the purse, I’ll buy Corr and I’ll move back to my father’s house out on the western rock and let only the wind change my direction.”
Perhaps because I’ve only just discovered the formidable beauty of the Malvern stables, I’m incredulous. “Wouldn’t you miss all this?”
Now he looks up at me, and from this angle, it looks like someone has smeared charcoal beneath the skin under his eyes. “What’s there to miss? This was never mine to miss.” This makes him heave a deep sigh, which seems like the closest thing to a confession I’ve heard from him, and then he pushes to his feet. “What about you, Kate Connolly? Puck Connolly?”
The way he says it, I feel certain he misremembered intentionally, because he liked the weight of the words when he said my name twice, and that makes me feel warm and nervous and agreeable.
“What about me?”
He trades me again, the bucket for the lead, and I step back. “What will you do if you win the Scorpio Races?”
I look into the bucket.
“Oh, I’ll buy fourteen dresses and build a road and name it after myself and try one of everything at Palsson’s.”
Though I don’t quite look up, I can still feel his gaze on me. It’s a heavy thing, this look of his. He says, “What’s the real answer?”
But when I try to think of a real answer, it reminds me of Father Mooneyham saying that Gabe had sat in the confessional and cried, and it makes me think of how, no matter what happens in the races, the best option still has Gabe sailing away in a boat. So I snap, “Do you think I just turn my secrets out for everyone?”
He is unfazed. “I didn’t know they were secrets,” he says. “Or I wouldn’t have asked.”
It makes me feel ungenerous, since he’d answered so honestly. “I’m sorry,” I say. “My mother always said that I was born out of a bottle of vinegar instead of born from a womb and that she and my father bathed me in sugar for three days to wash it off. I try to behave, but I always go back to the vinegar.” When Dad was in one of his rare, fanciful moods, he told guests that the pixies left me on the doorstep because I bit their fingers too often. My favorite was always when Mum said that before I was born, it rained for seven days and seven nights solid, and when she went out into the yard to ask the sky what it was weeping for, I dropped out of the clouds at her feet and the sun came out. I always liked the idea of being such a bother that I affected even the weather.
Sean says, “Don’t apologize. I was being too free.”
And now I feel even worse, because that wasn’t what I meant at all.
Beside Sean, Corr abruptly shifts his weight and the motion of his head seems more lupine than equine. Something in his expression makes Sean spit on his fingers and press Corr toward the wall again.
I’m afraid that he’s going to ask me to leave the stall now, so I ask hurriedly, “What is the spitting? I saw you do it before.” I don’t have to fabricate interest. It appeals to a part of me that has been repressed by years of studious effort on the part of the adults in my life.
Sean looks at his fingers as if he means to spit on them to demonstrate, and then he simply opens and closes them. He studies Corr as he thinks, as if Corr will somehow provide a way for him to frame his answer. “It’s — spit. Salt. Me. It’s a part of me, it’s a way for me to be somewhere. When the rest of me can’t be.”