The Angel on the Roof

The Neighbor

The idea was to watch his gaunt wife, seated on the sulky, drive the chocolate-colored mare down the dirt road to the general store, to make a small purchase there, and return. He was a black man in his fifties, she a white woman the same age, his children (from a previous marriage) were black, her children (also from a previous marriage) were white. Everyone else in town was white, also. Many of them had never seen a black man before this one. That’s probably why he had this idea about the sulky and his wife and the store.

On the other hand, he may have had it because he and his wife and all their children were incompetent and, in various ways, a little mad. The madness had got them kicked out of the city, but here, after three years in a small farm-community north of the city, it was the incompetence that had angered the people around them. Country people can forgive madness, but a week ago, the family’s one immediate neighbor, a dour young man in his late twenties, walked out his back door and saw for the tenth time one of their chickens scratching in his pathway to the woodpile. He rushed back into his house and, returning with an Army.45 handgun, fired eight bullets into the chicken, making a feathered, bloody mess of it.

That same night, the black man with his two teenage daughters and his two teenage stepsons and his wife drove to the racetrack and bought for one hundred dollars an unclaimed trotter, an eighteen-year-old mare named Jenny Lind. They rented a van and lugged her home and put her in the barn with the goats, sheep, chickens, and the two Jersey heifers. The farm, the huge barn, the animals — except for the mare — were all part of an earlier idea, the idea of living off the land. But the climate had proved harsh, the ground stony and in hills, the neighbors more or less uncooperative — and there was that incompetence.

It was the end of summer, and every morning as the sun rose the black man got up and before his breakfast walked the mare along the side of the dirt road in the low, cold mist. Behind him, in layers, were the brown meadow and the clumpy rows of gold and ruby-colored elm trees and the dark hills and the mist-dimmed orange sun. Every morning he paraded Jenny Lind the length of the route he had planned for his wife and the sulky — his shining arm raised to the bridle, his face proudly looking straight ahead of him as he walked past his neighbor’s house, his mind reeling with delight as he imagined his wife in her frail-wheeled sulky riding to the store, where she would buy him some pipe tobacco and some salt for the table, a small package to be wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, and then, after she returned along the curving dirt road to the house, one of her sons or one of his daughters would run out and hold the reins for her and help her step graciously down. In that way, the horse received its daily exercise — for no one in the family knew how to ride, because, as the father pointed out to them, no one in the family had yet been to a riding academy, and, besides, Jenny Lind was a trotter.

They searched all over the state for a sulky they could afford, but no one would sell it to them. Finally, he phoned the man at the racetrack who had sold them the horse and learned of a good, used sulky for sale in a town in the far southwest corner of the state. That morning, after exercising the mare, he and his wife got into the pickup truck and drove off to see about the used sulky.

All day long, the two teenage sons and the two teenage daughters rode the mare bareback up and down the dirt road, galloping past the neighbor’s house, braking to a theatrical stop at the general store, and galloping back again. A hundred times they rode the old horse full-speed along the half-mile route. Silvery waves of sweat covered her heaving sides and neck, and her large, watery eyes bulged from the exertion, and late in the afternoon, as the sun was drifting down behind the pines in back of the house, the mare suddenly veered off the road and collapsed on the front lawn of the neighbor’s house and died there. The boy who was riding her was able to leap free of the collapsing bulk, and astonished, terrified, he and his brother and stepsisters ran for their own house and hid in a loft over the barn, where, eating sandwiches and listening to a transistor radio, they awaited the return of their parents.

The neighbor stood in his living room and, as darkness came on, stared unbelieving at the dead horse on his lawn. Finally, when it was completely dark and he couldn’t see it anymore, he walked onto his front porch and sat on the glider and waited for the black man and his wife to come home.

Around ten o’clock, he heard their pickup clattering along the road. The truck stopped beside the enormous bulk of the horse. With the pale light from the truck splashed across its dark body, the animal seemed of gigantic proportions, a huge equestrian monument pulled down by vandals. The neighbor left his porch and walked down to where the horse lay. The black man and his white wife had got out of their truck and were sitting on the ground, stroking the mare’s forehead.

The neighbor was a young man, and while a dead animal was nothing new to him, the sight of a grown man weeping and a woman sitting next to him, also weeping, both of them slowly stroking the cold nose of a horse ridden to death — that was something he’d never seen before. He patted the woman and the man on their heads, and in a low voice told them how the horse had died. He was able to tell it without judging the children who had killed the animal.

Then he suggested that they go on to their own house, and he would take a chain and, with his tractor, would drag the carcass across the road from his lawn to their meadow, where tomorrow they could bury it by digging a pit next to it. Close enough, he told them, so that all they had to do was shove the carcass with a tractor or a pickup truck and it would drop in. They quietly thanked him and got up and climbed back into their truck and drove to their own house.