Darcy Scanlon Moulton

Cold Days 1

Charcoal

Salt Hay

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        He pushed against the horse’s rump to give himself more room in the stall. She grudgingly moved over a few inches. “This’ll make it feel better,” he said and rubbed pine tar into the deep cuts that had been torn into her hide by a whip.

        He’d fired the farmhand on the spot. Everyone knew after a horse got stuck, you couldn’t force them to walk on the marsh. And she’d gotten good and stuck – all four hooves – her body straining and pulling against the deep mire, head tossing wildly, her whinnies merging into a scream. No whip could force her to trod that wetland again, only time.

        The problem was he still had towering piles of salt hay to transport, but being down both a horse and a man, he’d need to hire a gundalow to get it done and with temperatures plummeting, boats were scarce. Or he could wait until the ground was frozen and hope his horse would be ready to go back in a few weeks.

        He’d be out there himself; almost all his days were spent on the marsh. He’d only left home once, when as a young man, he’d bucked against farming and his father found him a position weighing hay at Boston’s Haymarket Square. All summer long, the smells of rotting fish and sewage clogged his nostrils until the day a strong wind blew through and left behind a fresh ocean tang. Oh, the homesickness! He dug his hand into the nearest stack of salt hay, pulled out a long blade, and stuck it in his mouth – briny and green, the taste of the marsh, a flavor that seeped into the cow’s milk if you fed them too much of it. Sucking on the blade, he made plans to go home.

        The brine ran in his blood now, and he was sure it ran in his horse’s too. He stroked her neck until she was calm. Little pools of dust rose from the packed earth floor as he walked out of the stall, picked up a pitchfork, and tossed a forkful of salt hay into her rack. “Here girl,” he said. “This’ll get you back on the marsh.”