Mending Horses by M. P. Barker Page B

been an idiot to let her get away.
    â€œIf Nuala was here, she’d’a died in a fever, lying in her own filth, just like Jimmy and Mick done,” Liam said bitterly. “She was lucky to go like she did. Better for her that way than this one.”
    Hugh stared blearily at his eldest son, the boy’s yellow hair dark with filth, drooping across his sweaty forehead and into eyes blue and cold as steel, a boy’s eyes no longer. Liam was like his mam, too, but only the hard bits: the sharp tongue and harsh laugh she’d acquired those last few years. The lad was so young to be so bitter. Margaret had been bitter, too, by the time she’d died. Well, a hard life could do that to folk, and none so hard as Hugh’s own. “All gone,” he said softly. “All gone and naught I could do.” Liam would be next, he thought, already mourning the son who stood trembling against the wall.
    Something hit him in the chest, taking the wind out of him. His arms flailed, blindly grabbing the bucket that Liam had thrown at him. Hugh hadn’t thought the lad would have the strength to lift so much as a handkerchief, never mind the heavy wooden bucket.
    â€œHere’s something you can do,” the boy said, pointing to the bucket. “Fetch some water, why don’t you? The least you can do is clean ’em up so they can be buried decent.” He dropped to his knees and waved the flies away from the blanket, carefully folded it down, every motion an effort for his shaking body. He exposed the lads’ ashen faces, then their shoulders, the stench of their sickness, of their emptied bladders and bowels rising as he peeled the blanket back from their grotesquely distended bellies.
    Hugh’s stomach roiled and he clamped a hand over his nose and mouth to keep the reek out and his dinner in. He tried to turn away, but he couldn’t stop himself from staring at the two obscenely inhuman things that used to be his lads. “I can’t,” he protested, clutching the bucket to his chest as if it could ward off his dead sons’ angry spirits, his living son’s accusing eyes, his own shame and guilt.
    Liam’s hands reached out and circled his father’s wrists like shackles. The anger and bitterness in his eyes dissolved into exhaustion and tears. “For Christ’s sake, Da. Please. I can’t be doing this alone. I need you, Da.” He gestured toward the lads. “They need you.”
    Oh, yes, Liam looked like his mam all right. Like Margaret the day she died, her face pale and narrow and full of pain and terror, her grip on his arm suddenly so powerful he’d feel the bruises for days after. Then just as suddenly gone, her hands, face, eyes, empty as his heart without her. Hugh couldn’t see his son anymore for his own weeping, weeping all the while he fled the shanty, the empty bucket falling from his arms with a hollow thud.

Chapter Twelve

Tuesday, September 10, 1839, Chauncey, Connecticut
    â€œ ’Tain’t fair, Phizzy.” Billy pressed her legs tighter around Phizzy’s broad belly, urging him into a canter with calves and thighs and seat the way Mr. S. had taught her.
    At first she’d been thrilled when Mr. S. had rescued that gawky lad with the big ears. But now she wished the lad had proved to be a murderer and was locked safely away.
    It had been bad enough that Mr. S. had invited that one to travel with them, but now the lad knew her secret. Any day he would tell on her and she’d have to go back to being Nuala, and it would be that new lad traveling with Mr. S. instead of her.
    It wasn’t right. Wasn’t this her true self, this boy she’d invented? Wasn’t Mr. S. more her true da than the one she’d been given by mistake?
    She leaned forward and wrapped her arms around Phizzy’s neck, burying her face in his coarse mane. The moment she’d laid eyes on Phizzy she’d known that she was