Ostler

The horse came to us in November, in the back of a lorry that had carried sheep, and stood in the yard for eleven minutes before it would come down the ramp.

I counted. I was nine and counting was what I had instead of an opinion.

My grandfather did not touch it. That was the first thing I learned about him, and I had known him all my life. He stood at the head of the ramp with his hands behind his back like a man at a funeral and he waited, and the horse came down when it was ready, and the man from the lorry said something about it being ruined and my grandfather said, without turning round, that he would let him know.

It was a bay gelding, sixteen hands, with a scar the length of my forearm on the near shoulder and an eye you could not hold. Somebody had taught it that hands were a thing that happened to it.

For nine days he did nothing with it at all. He put it in the low field on its own and he went and stood in the low field, at the far end, with his back to it, doing something with a piece of rope that did not need doing. On the fourth day it came within thirty feet of him. On the seventh it stood behind him, close enough that I could see its breath going over his shoulder, and he did not turn round, and I understood — nine years old, freezing, hanging on the gate — that I was watching a man do the most difficult thing I had ever seen anybody do, which was nothing, on purpose, for a long time.

That was the winter my mother came back. But that is further on.