It is fully five years since I began my daily visits to the horses, Willie and Johnny. I met them first when the pandemic protocols imposed physical distancing. I needed a road wider than the narrow river trail I habitually walked. The dirt and gravel Quarry Road, with its bordering meadows and two dairy farms, was the solution.
And there they were, behind the wooden railings of their roadside paddock – two well-groomed graceful horses who approached when I passed by, apparently curious. The taller of the two, a rich chestnut colour, has a white diamond on his forehead. This, I later learned from Kevin, their owner, is Johnny. The smaller horse, a charcoal black, is Willie. Because Kevin is often listening to country music in his garage, I assume the horses are named after Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. But I have never had this confirmed.
One day I asked if I could bring Willie and Johnny pieces of carrot and apple. “Oh, they’ll love it,” Kevin’s mother told me. And so they do. They come to the fence as soon as they see me, unless they are engrossed in a new bale of hay. Most often, they will come even then if I call them by name.
They are the first horses I have ever known, other than a single riding lesson years ago on a mare called Angie. I judged myself to be a particularly bad pupil and felt uncomfortable obliging this strong lovely animal to carry me. In other words, I questioned whether I had the right to ride a horse who had not given her consent for me to do so.
Through Willie and Johnny I have learned how very distinct horses’ characters are. As I stand at the fence, with my daily offerings, Johnny, who is a stallion, towers above me. The look he gives me conveys his pride in who he is. It is impossible not to be aware how formidable is his physical power. He sometimes deliberately intimidates the smaller, gentler Willie, charging at him or trying to nip his flank. For the most part, he will desist from his aggression if I chastise him with “Johnny, no!” Willie is ever gracious. He allows me to pat his nose, a familiarity Johnny will not tolerate. He will, however, let me stroke the side of his neck, while averting his head.
To the best of my knowledge, they have never been work horses of any kind. Kevin keeps them because he loves horses and these two in particular. His mother tells me they sense when his truck is approaching, even from miles away.
Although they are nearing twenty, there are mornings when – stirred by the breeze or some compelling inner impulse – they burst into a gallop and circle their paddock, manes flying. As I watch them, I am certain there are few sights in the world more magnificent.
Their exuberant joy in free movement and speed reminds me of the transfiguring world of Edwin Muir’s The Horses. This narrative poem, set in a rural landscape like that of his Orkney childhood, opens on the gloom of a post-atomic global disaster: “the seven days’ war that put the world to sleep.” The surviving residents of this remote community watch a warship pass by, dead bodies piled on the deck. The radios have gone silent, but if they should speak again the narrator says, “We would not listen, we would not let it bring/That old bad world that swallowed its children quick/At one great gulp.”
It is in the concluding stanza the transfiguration comes, making their community an Eden once again. “Late in the summer the strange horses came,” announced first by “a distant tapping on the road,” then “a deepening drumming.” “We saw the heads/ Like a wild wave charging and were afraid,” the narrator tells us. The people’s fear is rooted in the fact they had sold their horses in their fathers’ time to buy the tractors, which post-disaster, stand useless in the fields. The animals therefore seem strange to them, like “fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield,” and they are too overcome by awe to go near them.
Yet the horses wait, “Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent/By an old command to find out our whereabouts/And that long-lost archaic companionship.” In those first encounters, the people had no thought whatsoever that these were beings “to be owned and used.” Yet since then, the horses have willingly pulled their ploughs and carried their loads.
This willing service that simultaneously redeems their broken world is the extraordinary gift the horses bestow on the community. “But their free servitude can still pierce our hearts,” the narrator affirms. “Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.”
So it is when I see Willie and Johnny race with manes aloft. Their swift radiance seems, for those few moments, to mend all that is broken in our time.