Justin Morgan Had a Horse, Page 2

  The early morning light made a fuzzy shadow of Little Bub as he came pattering straight across the road to Ebenezer.

  Joel smothered a cry of joy. He was almost afraid to breathe. He looked neither to the right nor to the left. His bare feet sank noiselessly into the dust. “Please, God,” he whispered, “don’t let Little Bub turn back. Please, God, don’t let him turn back.”

  But Little Bub had no thought of turning back. He threw his head high and investigated the wind with all manner of snuffings and snortings. Then his delicate ears pointed this way and that to hear the small thunder of his own hoofbeats. At last he whisked his curly black tail. “I’m coming along!” he said, more plainly than if he had talked.

  Justin Morgan looked at the young colt and frowned. Then he saw the happy tilt to the boy’s head. He shrugged his shoulders. “All right, all right,” he said helplessly.

  Joel’s excitement could not be held in. He let out a great sigh of happiness. Little Bub was his! There was no mistaking it now. At least for the long journey home, the colt was his!

  3. Northward to Vermont

  THEY WERE scarcely out upon the highroad when Master Morgan began teaching. Teaching was in his blood, and he couldn’t help giving lessons along the way.

  “Joel,” he announced in his first-day-of-school voice, “we have two new pupils with us, and I’m of a mind to make this a pleasant junket. If we swing along at a nice easy pace, we should reach the village of Chicopee before the sun is over our heads. That’s where the little Chicopee River joins up with the big Connecticut. You remember how the Connecticut got its name, don’t you, Joel?”

  Joel nodded but said nothing as he led Ebenezer along and kept his eye on the caperings of Little Bub. He knew the answer well enough, but the way the schoolmaster told it made it more exciting.

  “Boys!” the teacher was saying. “I want you to picture Indian braves shooting their boats over the rapids, calling out to each other: ‘Quonnec! Quonnec!’ which means ‘long,’ and ‘tuck’ which means ‘river.’ ”

  Joel could almost see the brown bodies like arrows flashing through the spray. “Quonnec-tuck sounds fiercer and better than Connecticut,” he offered.

  “So it does!” the schoolmaster chuckled. He turned from the boy, and with a smile let his glance slide over the gangly colts. Now that they were his, he felt an inner squeeze of affection. He watched the dust rise from under their tiny feet as they pranced along. “Ebenezer, Little Bub,” he spoke quietly to them, “we’ll be crossing a covered bridge soon. You two ever been on a bridge? Likely not. But you’ll admire the sound of your hoofs clattering over wood. See if you don’t!”

  The colts pricked their ears to take in the schoolmaster’s voice. It had a soft huskiness that seemed part of the wind and the river. And the way he looked at them when he talked—it was as if they were all friends making a pilgrimage together.

  “Along about twilight,” the master went on, “we should be near enough to Hadley Falls to feel the spray on our faces. We’ll have a fine feast there. Joel and I will catch pike or perch, while you two graze the delicious grass that grows on the banks. And it wouldn’t surprise me if an obliging farmer would have a nosebag of corn to trade for the writing of a letter or the chanting of a psalm. Then we’ll all bed down under the stars and let the music of the falls sing us to sleep.”

  And so, with pleasant talk, the morning spent itself. Noontide found them crossing the bridge at Chicopee, just as the schoolmaster said they would. And by sundown they were all in wading below Hadley Falls, the man and the boy fishing for their supper, the colts rolling in the water, sudsing themselves clean.

  In the early mist of the next morning, they were on their way again. The road they traveled was no more than a path, winding its way among trees. Ever so often the schoolmaster sat down on the ground and leaned against a tree to rest. This gave the colts a chance to eat the green shoots that came up through the forest duff and to scratch their itchy shoulders against the tree trunks. And it gave Joel time to ease his bundle of clothes onto Little Bub and acquaint him with the feel of something on his back.

  One day, while going through a deep woods, they heard the ring of ax strokes and the grunting of horses bent to the pull. Ebenezer whinnied to his fellow creatures. Then Little Bub added a few high notes which ended in a low rumble.

  Joel laughed, and when they came upon the men clearing the wilderness, he explained like some proud parent, “That bugling you heard was our Little Bub. He was trying to act like a grown-up horse.”

  They passed well-tilled country, too—wheat fields, and fields of Indian corn with yellow squash planted between the rows. And they passed meadow land with horned cattle grazing. And one morning they met a train of oxcarts. The very first driver pulled up to chat.

  “Howdy, folks!” he said. “Smart big colt you got there.” Then he pointed his whip toward Little Bub. “But that runty one . . . ” He paused a moment, sizing him up more carefully. “Nope, that little feller don’t look like he’ll amount to much.”

  This was the first time a traveler compared the two colts, but it was not the last. Day after day as they journeyed northward toward Vermont, their fellow travelers admired Ebenezer and scoffed at Little Bub. A cobbler who joined up with them for a mile or two even offered to buy the big colt in trade for his lapstone and awl. But Master Morgan needed cobbler’s tools even less than he needed a horse.

  “Joel,” the schoolmaster admitted after he had turned down another offer, “discouragement rides me. With one colt at heel and another running free, our return trip is slowed. Here it is almost pumpkin time, and school begins in a month. How long will it take us? Three weeks? Four?”

  The schoolmaster expected no answer and got none. He was talking as if to himself. The added responsibility seemed to weary him. Anxious as he was to get home, he had to stop more and more often to rest in the shade. Joel, meanwhile, pulled burrs out of Little Bub’s tail and mane. And then, if Master Morgan’s head nodded in sleep, he began talking nonsense to Little Bub as if they were two boys with a secret all their own. To his delight, the thing he longed for most was happening. The colt was answering in funny little whickers.

  “He’s smart as a fox,” Joel would tell the schoolmaster when he awoke. “Knows lots of things.”

  As the journey continued, Master Morgan had to agree that Bub was smart. Always it was the little colt who first sensed the presence of a snake and warned the others with a rattling of his own breath. And always it was the little colt whose ear first caught the faraway blowing of a conch shell calling men from the fields into dinner. The sound reminded him of Farmer Beane’s place, where mealtime for the family meant a handout for him, too—turnip tops or carrot greens, or even leftover applejohn. Now, far away from home, he was off like a bullet at the faintest sounding of the conch shell.

  The others learned to follow eagerly, for his trail always led to a kitchen door, where the air was spicy with the smell of gingerbread baking, or the steaming fragrance of pork pie.

  There the schoolmaster would remove his hat and sing in his softly husky voice:

  “So pilgrims on the scorching sand,

  Beneath a burning sky,

  Long for a cooling stream at hand;

  And they must drink or die.”

  Before he reached the second stanza, the doorstep swarmed with curious-eyed children. “Look, Ma!” the youngsters would shout to the mother, who now came out, wiping her hands on her apron. “See the colts, Ma! They be singing, too!”

  It was true. Whenever Master Morgan hit a high note, Ebenezer neighed, and then Little Bub chimed in with a rumbling obbligato.

  This sent the children into peals of laughter.

  When the song was over, the farmwife would suddenly think of her baking and send her eldest in to mind it. Then she would insist that the master and the boy come into the kitchen for a good hot meal, while the colts were turned out to pasture.

  As she watched her guests enj
oy her cooking, she would compliment them. “Oh, ’twas a joyful noise to listen to your hymn-singing without its being the Sabbath day!”

  “Joel, of course, knows,” Master Morgan replied, “but I may as well tell you that I composed these anthems myself. And nothing pleasures me more than to sing them.”

  • • •

  There were days, however, when the schoolmaster did not sing at all, days when the wind churned the dust and set him to coughing. Then he walked more slowly, trying to quiet his spasms, sometimes steadying himself against the big colt.

  It was strange how Justin Morgan and Ebenezer drew together as the trip lengthened out. They both tired early and they both seemed fearful of the wild animals that prowled by night. At the first sign of dusk, their eyes probed the shadows for catamounts and wolves, and Ebenezer’s nostrils flared to catch their scent.

  “Time to build a fire and bed down,” Master Morgan would say. Yet neither the man nor the big colt could sleep. The man sat up cross-legged, elbows on knees, head resting in his hands, while nearby the colt dozed standing up. The smallest sounds startled them—an acorn falling on dry leaves, the pitapat of rabbit feet, the whimpering of an owl.

  Joel and Bub, however, were lulled by the soft voices of night. The little colt lay stretched out on his side, and gradually the boy edged nearer and nearer until soon he was curled snug against the colt’s back. It felt warm and furry, and Bub did not seem to mind.

  Morning found them both eager and ready for new adventure. Rain or hot sunshine beating down on their heads, steep trails, skimpy food—nothing discouraged them. It was Joel and Bub who set the pace, and Ebenezer and the schoolmaster who lagged behind.

  But one noonday, a third of the way home, the schoolmaster was suddenly a man transformed. They had crossed the state line into Vermont, and almost miraculously he seemed to gain new strength from the familiar green hills. He could not stop talking about them.

  “Boys!” he rejoiced, as he called his pupils to a halt. “Vermont is named for its mountains. Vert for green and mont for mountain.”

  He straightened up to his full height and took off his hat in salute. “Our first settlers made a grand ceremony of the christening,” he said, a light of pride in his eye. “They climbed Mount Pisgah right over yonder, and from that lofty eminence they looked round about. What they saw pleased them: hills peopled with deer, and down below in the valleys a carpet of green threaded with silver streams and rushing brooks.”

  Joel sighed. He wished he could find the right words, too, for the things he felt. He half closed his eyes, so that he could see the little company of pioneers climbing up Mount Pisgah. He tried to make believe the schoolmaster’s voice belonged to one of them.

  “ ‘We are met here upon this mount,’ ” the teacher was reciting, “‘which is part of the spine of America, which holds together the terrestrial ball, and divides the Atlantic Ocean from the Pacific. We are met here, gentlemen, to dedicate this wilderness to God and to give it a worthy name. That name shall be Vert Mont, in token that her mountains and hills shall be ever green and shall never die.’ ”

  The boy put his arm around Little Bub’s neck, listening to the husky voice as it now quoted from the Bible:

  “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills . . . ”

  Joel knew what the next words would be, and in his mind he was riding on Bub’s back, riding into the hills.

  “ . . . from whence cometh my help,”

  he sang joyously in chorus with the schoolmaster.

  4. Horse-Trader Hawkes

  MAN AND boy and colts all seemed to fit together now, and to feel at home in the green hills. On and on they went, past tiny towns perched high on mountain shoulders or nestled snug in the crook of a stream. Nearly always a church spire rose from the cluster of homes and sharpened itself against the sky.

  They walked in the dark of woods and in the sunlight of farm clearings. They saw pigs wearing wood collars to keep them from rooting under fences and wriggling away. They saw flying squirrels leaping from tree to tree, and black bears eating butternuts, and brown weasels scuttling in the underbrush. They saw small lakes like polished mirrors, and fishermen in boats, and hawks gliding in for a landing.

  They heard the bleating of sheep, and wild geese honking, and beavers slapping their tails against the water. They heard the military music of waterfalls and the cradlesong of brooks.

  They clattered over bridges with the printed warning:

  WALK YOUR HORSES

  “That’s all we’ve been doing!” Master Morgan would say to Joel with a smile.

  Occasionally they ferried across swift-flowing streams. Ebenezer was struck with terror at sight of a ferry. He had to be bribed with corn and pushed to get on. Then he stood stiff-legged and quivering until the trip was over. But Little Bub sauntered aboard as gaily as a youngster going on a picnic. One ferryman nudged Master Morgan and laughed, “It’ll be sixpence apiece for you and the big colt, but I’ll let the lad and the runt go over for twopence, same as a goat.”

  Through deep grass, across broken country, along the gravelly bed of creeks, uphill and downhill, the little procession ate up the slow miles. Six days a week they pushed and plodded. But on the Sabbath they did not travel at all, for there was a law in Vermont forbidding it.

  Instead, the schoolmaster and the boy found the nearest meetinghouse and tied the colts to the hitching rack. Then shyly they stepped inside the cool, musty building and joined the worshipers.

  Crowded into a box pew, Joel tried to listen to the preacher’s voice running on, but it lulled him like the faraway droning of a bumblebee. His thoughts wandered, lifting him out of doors. He was at the hitching rack with the colts, tied alongside the work horses and oxen that had brought wagonloads of families to church. And they were all nodding and dozing in the warm sunshine as if they had known each other forever.

  During one drowsy sermon, the preacher suddenly brought his fist down with a bang, and the voice that had been so low exploded in a mighty roar:

  “Awake, thou that sleepest,

  For the day of salvation is nigh!”

  Heads everywhere in the meetinghouse fairly jolted to attention, while in the churchyard Little Bub let out a high bugle with that funny little rumble afterward.

  Joel had to smother his laughter, for the tithingman stood ready with his staff to tap anyone acting unseemly.

  When the service was over at last, the worshipers greeted Master Morgan and Joel and often invited them to join in the noontide meal. “We figure you folks come a-traveling a good long ways,” some motherly person would say. “You must be mighty hungry. Come! Follow us out under the elms.”

  Like a flock of hungry starlings, the congregation scattered on the church lawn. From picnic hampers came thick slices of ham, homemade cheese, and brown-bread sandwiches filled with a rich layer of apple butter.

  The boy and the master always ate their fill, and afterward the same motherly person would wrap up a nice cold snack of leftovers for them to take along.

  It took nearly a month to walk the hundred miles and more back home. The days were growing shorter, and to Joel the sun seemed far away and choosy. It picked out the blobs of scarlet sumac and the yellow maple leaves, and then hung a misty haze over the rest of the world.

  Now that the trip was almost over, the schoolmaster had little to say. He seemed to need all of his strength to put one foot ahead of the other. It was on a frosty twilight in September that they came to the junction of the Connecticut and the White rivers.

  “At last, we are almost home! At last we leave the Connecticut!” the schoolmaster sighed, raising an arm in farewell. “When the Indians named it the Long River, they were right as a bonnet in church.”

  The thought of home put an uneasiness on Joel. His mother, he knew, would try to figure a way to keep the colts, but his father . . .

  “See that house snuggled down close to the White River?” the schoolmaster asked.

  “Which
one?” Joel wanted to know as his eye took in the cluster of frame buildings.

  “The shabby one with the splendid chimney.”

  “And smoke curling out of it?”

  “The very one. My sister Eunice lives there, and she will give us a night’s lodging. Then first thing in the morning, we’ll go next door and see what Neighbor Hawkes thinks of the colts. He’s a good judge of horseflesh, and a sharp trader. He may even want to buy them.”

  Fear struck at Joel’s heart. “Couldn’t you just sell Ebenezer?” he asked quickly. “Little Bub probably wouldn’t fetch much, anyway.”

  The schoolmaster had not heard. “Chimney smoke and candlelight look mighty inviting to me,” he murmured as he headed toward his sister’s house, half leaning on Ebenezer.

  That night Joel slept in a bed for the first time on the homeward trip. It was a trundle bed, so short that he had to make an S of his body, and even then his toes poked through the slats. He felt crowded in on himself, and in his sleep he kept hitching around, dreaming he was Little Bub stabled in a chicken coop belonging to Horse-Trader Hawkes.

  Hiram Hawkes was at breakfast the next morning when Master Morgan, Joel, and the colts appeared. He came out onto the stoop, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Jumping Aunt Minnie!” he gulped. “Yer sister and me begun to think you two was never coming back, and here you be with two colts to boot.”

  Master Morgan stood twisting the frayed ends of Ebenezer’s lead rope. His eye caught Joel’s, then looked away. “What do you think of them?” he asked politely.

  Hawkes squinted. He approached the animals cautiously, taking care to keep well out of kicking range. He circled one at a time. Then he stood with his own spindly legs braced far apart.

  “Wal, now, Morgan,” he drawled as he played with the watch chain looped across his paunch, “I’d say the big feller looks fair to middling, just fair to middling. But that little cob—he won’t be worth no more than five dollar. Not even when he’s growed. Legs too short, for one thing. He just ain’t strung up right, Morgan. Now you’ve asked, and I’ve give it to you straight.”