Love

My grandfather wanted to tell me the story of the horse that died of heartache.

“What are you thinking?” my grandmother said.

The horse’s name was Sully, my grandfather said. (Which must have meant something quite different in another language. I did not ask.)

“A beauty,” he said.

He said it was true, the story he told: “Ven I vas a boy”—before the wars, before the influenza. He said Sully was owned by a neighbor he’d had. “A beautiful mare,” he said to me. “Magnificent. The apple of the village. The neighbor vas poor, of course.” At last and in time and at very great length, he was persuaded, this neighbor, with a marvelous regret, my grandfather said, to part with her, to sell her to a traveling show.

He missed this horse.

One day in the spring of the following year, the traveling show traveled back to the village. Everyone went, my grandfather said. Every last soul who could scrape the amount to pay for a ticket. “And vot do you think?” He raised his hands, reddened from labor. “Sully broke rank the minute she saw her old master again. A plume, she had. A feather. She ran to him, ran out of the ring.” He saw through the fence posts, my grandfather did. “He threw his arms around her neck! But he could not afford to buy her back.”

“And?” I said, though I had heard it before, and more than once, and asked again.

“The horse collapsed that very night.”

He was old, my grandfather. “A plume this high.”

“Why are you telling a story like this to a child?” said my grandmother, when all was done, as was her way.

She served us cake, golden.

I had a new question.

My grandfather chewed. “Vell,” he said. There was no one alive in the village, he said, not anymore, at least not that he knew. The man did not get out, he said. “So far as I know.”

“You know, there are people,” my grandmother said, as she captured a crumb, “who eat to live.”

“Ve live to eat,” he said.

She gave him a napkin.

He died when he was very old. He’d stopped speaking English.

“What is this?” the night nurse said. “This language of his?”