Marvel and a Wonder Read Online Free PDF Page A

this.” Finally his breath became regular and he was able to climb inside. He called out the boy’s given name and Quentin came trotting down the stairs, alarmed; then the boy helped his grandfather to the parlor sofa. The look of worry on the boy’s face, his childish expression, was frightening.
    “Are you okay?” he asked. “Sir?”
    Jim nodded, unsure if he could answer. They sat side by side on the sofa for some time, the mayflies jostling the windows, his heartbeat slowing down, his breath coming hard.
    Twenty minutes later, the boy broke the silence. He looked over at his grandfather, who had his hands before him, folded as if in prayer, and asked, “When is she coming back?”
    The grandfather put a hand on the boy’s knee and slowly shook his head.
    The boy nodded and sniffed, then hurried from the room.
    A half hour later, when the grandfather fell into bed, it felt like death.

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    The white mare appeared on a Monday. Neither the grandfather nor the grandson had any idea who’d sent it. At first there was only the violent agitation of the pickup as it rattled along the unmarked road, towing behind it a fancy silver trailer, all ten wheels upsetting the air with a cloud of dust high as a steeple. The grandfather raised his hand to his eyes to try to make out the shape of the thing coming. It was a late afternoon in mid-July and the sun had just begun to falter behind the hills and tree line. The black pickup with its out-of-town plates bounced through the gate then pulled to a stop near the corner of the bleachy henhouse. Every bird on the farm, all the Silver Sussex roosters, all the Maran hens, turned to face the commotion with a prehistoric silence, waiting for the grit to begin to settle. When a man with sunglasses like a state trooper pulled himself out from behind the truck’s wheel, stretching his legs from what appeared to have been a long trip, Jim asked him what it was about. The man had a clipboard and some papers which he asked Jim to sign, in triplicate, before leading him around to the back of the trailer. There he handed Jim a pink sheet of paper and pair of silver keys. The horse, sleek-looking even behind steel bars, huffed through its pink nostrils, disappearing back into the darkness.
    “It’s yours,” the man said.
    “Mine?”
    “Yours.”
    “But . . . but what for?” Jim asked.
    The man with the sunglasses shrugged, itched his nose, and said, “I just get paid to deliver it,” then he put away his ink pen and began to unhook the trailer from the pickup’s hitch. It seemed the trailer had also been bequeathed, though Jim still did not know from whom. The man with the sunglasses handed another pink piece of paper to Jim, stepped clear of a mud puddle, and climbed back inside the cab of the pickup.
    “But there’s been some kind of mistake,” the grandfather said.
    The man readjusted his dark sunglasses, lit a cigarette, exhaled—the smoke rising in twin, nearly invisible tendrils about his craggy face—and looked down at the clipboard and said, “This the right address?”
    Jim nodded.
    “You Jim Falls?”
    The grandfather nodded again.
    “No mistake.” The man scowled and gave the ignition a start. “By the way, it’s got a name. Right here,” the man said, pointing to the pink page. Then the black pickup was pulling away, was driving off, then was gone. Jim walked over to the rear of the trailer. The horse was turning back and forth before him with an air of expectancy, the old man and the horse like children then, hesitant at their parents’ ankles, waiting to meet. The grandfather had never been fond of horses; there had been a pair of mules his father had borrowed to plow furrows for the corn, but those days were long gone.
    The hired hand, Rodrigo, had always claimed to have been raised on a horse ranch. Without so much as a word, he set down a Maran rooster, stepped up to the trailer, unlocked the bar, opened the gate, and slowly led the horse