Not Just Horses

The city fades into the countryside like a sunset. Gradients of urban sprawl to rambling hills and briars, and in between are the steps of the residential neighbourhoods and suburbs, the barns spaced out across acres, the train tracks winding between houses and then between pines. Somewhere in the more urban part of this transition is the carousel man.

His workshop is in an area outside of downtown, but there are other shops around his. His looks almost nothing like a shop. It is the darkest workshop you’ve ever seen. Even at night, when the shop is open, it is almost impossible to detect a lamp by which the carousel man must be working. The house used to be a sort of home for older children with nowhere to live, a place where they worked out jobs and stayed with six cots to a room, and figured out their careers in the shops around or the mill or bouncing around as assistants to butchers or bakers. To be converted into a workshop, it must have been hollowed out completely. The walls taken away, the windows replaced, the floors pulled up and scraped at until they were flat, then new hardwood pressed down again. My brothers reckon it must have cost more time and money than knocking down the entire house and building up something new, but that’s where the carousel man settled.

I don’t call him the carousel man for lack of respect, but for all his reticence. He’s gone to the same café across the street from the flat I share with my brothers and my da and never have I heard him say his name. Only customers know his surname, and I haven’t ever heard it, only a rumour that it’s foreign and incredibly hard to say. He looks like someone with a difficult name, all appearance that’s as hard to fit into your head as foreign sounds are hard to fit into your mouth. He’s as much a mystery as his carousel creatures.

I’ve seen him plenty enough when I’ve gone to fetch coffee or tea for da and my brothers. He stands in line without touching anyone, which, in a rush on a Monday morning, is a feat. He’s got fine features, the sort you’d think belong on King Arthur or some other hero, but they look like they’ve been reflected onto his face by a mirror held at an angle. It’s hard to say exactly whether his chin is delicate or sharp, his eyes large or round, his mouth somber or firm. I’ve stood behind him a few times, and I know he must have heard some of the men in the line speaking to me. But he’s never fingered a piece of my hair or called me Bridgette or asked why my father thought it was a good idea to let me out of the house on my own. He might think my name really is Bridgette. He’s glanced at me once, when I near stumbled into him at the counter. He apologized quickly and quietly, like he’d done something wrong.

I asked the woman at the counter if he speaks to her when he comes in. He does, she’d said. But where everyone else needs six or seven words, he can stretch one or two to get the job done.

I liked his quick glance at me, though. It was like watching a wave roll out toward the sea and then pause, because you wanted it to. I feel like I’ve been rolled about in his ocean-eyes.

Perhaps it’s the ocean that calls me to visit his workshop.

Making ends meet has gotten harder and harder now that I’m selling fewer carousel horses. I don’t like to make just the horses, but my other pieces cannot be sold on their own. They sit in the workshop while I work on their companions. Each one is a product of blueprints and sketches, held in the same brick-wide paper pad in the bottom drawer of my desk. The commercial pieces don’t really need plans, unless someone asks for a particular design on a saddle. But my fingers know where to carve the horses’ smiles, where to round out their hooves, how many teeth fit into that smile. These are the ones I sell, and these are the ones that most often find their way back to me. Not the others. They have not been released to the work yet.

The broken horses take more time, and their recovery is not as fuelled, fiscally, as their orginal creation was. They’re the result of a crate already unpacked, a foot slipping off the curb, a cuss and a drop. They’re children’s fingerprints wearing at the paint and gounging marks and putting weight on the lightest part of the leg. They’re bad weather and someone’s recklessness or forgetfulness, and nights out in the snow or rain or hail. But even these ones stay in the front of the workshop with me. No point upsetting things by bringing them into the back.

I don’t mind fixing up the old horses. It is like seeing a companion who has weathered the same stormy sea as you. It is another thing for my hands to learn. To jump from gilding the creatures in the back of the workshop to repairing the ones I have already seen. There is love in both, even if there is more joy in one. But the carousel in the back of the shop can wait. Even if things are getting impatient. One needs to make the rent.

And what am I to say? People like the horses. They always have. Even the broken ones, they wish for again. They ask for the horses again and again. It is only the beauty of them, marred or gouged, that disturbs them. They only want for the beautiful, if it’s possible.

I’ve been on the outside of his workshop so often that I feel stepping into it must be a change, of some sort. There should be a thunderclap, a gust of wind, a door slamming shut somewhere. Instead, it’s like walking into a dim Aladdin’s cave. There are dust motes, the kind that collect in particularly dusty places, though there is no dust here. It looks disorganized to me, but da says often that a person’s space always looks in top-shape to them and like it’s ready to be swept into the bin to others. But even with all the clutter, not an inch of it is dirty, except for the mossy smelling corners. The rest of it is bottles of paint and varnish, silver and wood instruments, cloths and sandpaper. And everywhere: horses. They lean like bicycles on the wall, legs rounded like they’re spinning on spokes. Their mouths are open, like they’ve been paused mid-cry. They’re every colour in the sunset and the shadows. Their eyes all look ahead and at me when I walk inside.

The carousel man it looking through a glass at something spectacularly small between his fingers. It is a piece of clockwork, and it surprises me. I did not think there was any clockwork involved in these horses, but he’s working a spring made of two different coloured metals around something shimmering in the piece. It all clicks into place on a saddle that looks a little too small for one of the horses. A pony? Either he or the table smells like paint. The saddle is a shade of blue-green that you can only see in a crashing wave. His eyes are focused, like he’s accidentally fastened them to the clockwork and couldn’t pull them away now if he were to try.

“Does that colour have a name?” I ask. Ma’s old watercolour paints always had names. There would be three shades of purple that she’d make stretch for years because they were expensive, and I thought it was easy, because they looked like the same purple to me. But they had different names, like “lilac”, or “lily stone”. My voice has gone quiet, like it’s ma that I’m speaking to. The carousel man hasn’t looked at me, but he doesn’t look surprised either.

“Probably. I don’t know it,” he says. He puts something in place between clock parts and hesitates. Maybe he’s gotten it wrong, because he pulls it out and puts it elsewhere.

“Can I have a look?” I ask. If he’s attending to something important, I don’t want to interrupt him just to have a go at his paints. He nods and I feel a little proud that I’ve earned enough trust to inspect the bottles on the table, like they aren’t just there to peruse already. One of them looks about the shade of the ocean. “Water weed,” I say. It’s a little disappointing. “I didn’t know the carousel horses needed gears.”

He tilts his head, which might be him saying, well, they do, and might be him not knowing what to say. I choose to believe the second, because I’d like to. It would be nice to believe the carousel man knows as much about speaking as I do. He’s pushing some more clockworks in the underside of the saddle and sliding a little wooden door closed over it. It sticks just a bit.

I say, “I’ve got nothing to do all day. Can I watch you work?” I have a fear of saying it so plainly, but ma used to say that some people don’t understand a question coming at them unless it’s an arrow pointing between their eyes.

I don’t think he’s heard me at first. He’s turned the saddle over. His attention’s walking itself over to a horse on the table that looks nearly done. “Yes,” he says.

Before she came in today, the tasks were straightforward. Sanding the edge of the teeth on one of the mare’s, finish the pattern on the bridle of a stallion. Have a look at the sketch for one of the other carousel animals to add to the back. All of it is solitary work, and some of it is secret work. Now things have to be shifted for her. I don’t mind entirely. There are always horses in the front of the workshop to paint and package.

I look at the girl a couple of times, quickly. She’s looking at the horses like she’s both pleased with what she sees and expecting more. A little like me, then.

I know my brothers hate to be interrupted at their work, but maybe the carousel man is different. Being quiet isn’t necessarily being unfriendly. He might not speak to anyone in town easily, but this must be an easy place for him. If the words are going to flow anywhere, it’s over the heads of all of these colourful horses.

“Do you choose all of their colours before you paint them?” I ask him. Ma didn’t always choose her colours, even when she painted what was right in front of her. Sometimes she painted the night sky with the sunset for reference. It always worked out anyway- the night sky came right after.

He shakes his head. His hair’s a little longer than most men wear it. It’s a wonder it’s got no paint in it, no sawdust. It looks nothing like the horses’ hair, though some say he puts his own hair- and his spirit- into the horses. But he isn’t crying, bleeding, or sweating, into the paint. The rumours are all wrong so far. He’s got paint for his brush instead of blood.  “Sometimes customers choose them,” he says. “Or I choose them and try to make them different.”

“Are they better if they’re all different?” I ask. I’m trying to think of how many horses the carousel man must have made by now, and to think of that many horses, all of different colours and patterns, makes me dizzy. I look at the table and the other bits of horses. Hooves and ears that look like they’re broken off, and other pieces. There’s a tail that looks like it belongs more to a fox than a horse, and the black, round end of a snout.

His eyes run over my face and away again. It’s like a wave has climbed up my cheeks. They feel a little warm with it. “They tend to be,” he says.

He doesn’t seem to want to talk, but he doesn’t seem to not want to. It might be all the same to him. “The horses always look like they’re trying to run. Do you ever get tired of horses or carousels?”

He keeps painting, and every time he adds a layer of paint, it is like he’s painting the horse into the world, making it more solid and real. He shakes his head. He looks as careful with the horses as he does in the café, touching nothing that isn’t necessary to touch. “Carousels, no. Horses. Not the making of them. But horses, sometimes.”

“Why don’t you just make something else?” I ask. “You know clockwork. You could make clocks. You could make-” I don’t really know anything that needs clockwork other than clocks, but the words are out there now. “-music boxes.”

“New things,” he says, “Are like toys to some people. I don’t want to make something just so someone else can throw it out. And people like old things.”

“They’re nostalgic. People like new things too, though.”

“People like nostalgia sometimes more than having to look at something new. New isn’t as easy on the eyes.” His eyes dart to me and away. The ocean whispers against my skin. “Would you want a horse that makes you think of your childhood or something else you’d have to tame?”

“Like it’s real?” I say. This is the kind of carousel-making I want to see. “That’s magic. You know, some people reckon you do magic here, with the horses.”

He doesn’t look surprised, and now I wonder if the times he is out of his workshop he hears what everyone says about him and his horses. He dips the brush in turpentine and swirls it around. He dips it in a second pot of turpentine and uses some soap in a rag to finish cleaning it. “Here. This is one of the first steps.” He takes a long piece of wood and begins to carve. It doesn’t take long before I see the shape of what it is meant to be, and this must be magic, because I can’t see something that isn’t there before it’s there. It is like he’s sharing his vision with me. The mane of a horse seems to have been waiting in the wood for him to cut it out. Wood curls tumble on the floor between out feet. He doesn’t pray or invoke a god as he cuts. His hands know all the ridges before they appear. His fingers trace the swirls in the mane before they’re there.

“That looks like magic to me,” I say. This is the sort of thing ma would have said is flirting, but the way he takes it doesn’t make it seem like flirting.

He smiles, but it’s the smile of the sun glinting in your eye. It’s something good happening when you don’t expect it. It is the promise of magic, and magic seems like a very good thing right now. I think this place could be ripe with it.

“What is that for?” I ask, pointing to the white tail that doesn’t belong to any horse I’ve ever seen.

“That’s for something else,” he says. “In the back. This one,” he hoists up the part of the mane, “Is for that one.”

We walk over to a horse against the wall. She’s wearing a caparison painted with poppies and her coat is the colour of sunlight on earth. He puts the main on part of her neck and it fits just right. It is only a part of the main. The rest must be waiting inside more wood for him.

“When she’s done, where does she go?” I ask.

“Wherever she’s needed,” he says. “Does she look too much like a mare?”

“No.” I knew she’s a mare for no simple reason. And no complicated one. She looks just as a mare looks, to me. “The tail isn’t for her brother is it?”

This time when I look at her, she catches me at it. She doesn’t hold my eyes for the sake of holding them. She means her question. It is strange to have someone pick at the details of my workshop. She can’t be much younger than me, but she seems much older right now.

“No. It’s for something in the back.”

I put the piece of mane back on the table and add it to the list of things to do tomorrow. Maybe gold for the mare’s coat. She could not have known it was a mare unless I gave it away somehow.

She is still watching me. Asking a question.

The light on the other side of the workshop windows is late and rosy. The workshop really is getting too dim to see perfect details unless you’re right up close. It’s the way a toyshop looks in a fairy tale, everything drowsy with gold and more colourful than the real world. The horses look like they’ve shifted with the changing shadows. Da will be wondering where I’ve been all day, and despite everything, it feels a little frightening to tell him exactly where I have been. It feels like I’ve been somewhere much more private all day. I still don’t feel finished here. There is something more in this workshop than the mane he made in front of me. Something more magical.

“I think you could make these horses come to life if you wanted,” I tell him. He’s brushing metal and wood from the surface of the table as if he’s about to start all over again.

“These horses can’t come to life,” he says. He doesn’t seem to think it’s strange that I’ve said it. His focus has been stolen away, but not his attention. He still looks at the horses before anything else. He doesn’t look at me at all when he says, “I can show you the back.” It doesn’t sound like anything more than what he said, but my heart is suddenly rabbit-quick.

I knew there was a back to the workshop, but I did not know that it could be so big. It’s as big as the front, and more otherworldy, because the windows are higher and here the light falls on everything instead of hitting it. One window lights a long line of animals that look like they’re already on a carousel. But the carousel isn’t round, and it isn’t made of horses. It’s winding as a river, and everything that rears, bucks, stamps, paws, leaps, canters, runs, is different. The creature whose tail is sitting on the table in the front of the workshop is a silver fox, only a little smaller than the blood-orange money in front of it. The monkey’s eyes are the colour of a gold coin. Something green and scaly with a long snout and tail in front of the monkey makes me feel watched. These animals are the magic that folk talk about, without knowing what they’re saying. I never believed in spells, but enchantment is different, and I’ve never seen anything more enchanting.

“I didn’t know there were so many colours,” I say.

“These are the ones no one wants to buy,” he says. “They’re not for sale. And they’re not done.”

Some of them are covered in plastic, but I walk up to one that isn’t. The monkey. Until I get quite close to it, it’s fur looks real, like I could slide my hands into it. I put a hand on its face, between its eyes, and bring my fingers down. It’s smooth as glass. I stand just in front of its mouth. Its eyes look at me or past me. I cannot even see the other side of the carousel from here, but the animals must go all the way around it. It’s just in shadow, where the light doesn’t reach. I hear shuffling and look at the carousel man. “I think they’re beautiful.”

If he’s flattered, he doesn’t say so. The sun-bright smile from earlier doesn’t come back. I know from my brothers that if he were interested at all right now he would at least be looking at me or standing closer. But it’s as though the monkey’s put more barriers between us than before. I don’t have the bravery to do more than I have today, and he either has less bravery than I do, or less wanting. I feel my cheeks sting, like I’ve jumped into salt water, but he isn’t looking at me, and there’s no good explanation.

I step away from the monkey. He looks at its face. “Is it really magic?” I’m asking now. It's definitely not flirting.

“I’m closing soon,” he says. “It’d be a good idea if you left.”

It’s not just his eyes that won’t land on me. His voice doesn’t want to touch me either. Everything is aversion. I feel I’ve tripped right in front of him on the street while wearing my nicest dress. I’ve called for his attention just in time to embarrass myself. It feels terribly foolish to hope for magic now. There was no magic in opening the back door of the workshop for me. He was just letting me glimpse the inside, to see that there is no magic. Maybe he’s hoping I won’t come back tomorrow.

So I won’t. And if da asks, I’ve never gone near the carousel man.

She walks out of the workshop very differently from the way she walked in. Not nearly half as timid, and not nearly half as hopeful. I lock the front door and find a bench in the back room to begin working on the fox’s tail. When the sun has vanished, I light the lamps and ignore the shadows moving.

They get restless until I have to go up to the carousel. I put my hand on the monkey’s face, where she had, and slide it up, in the direction of the monkey’s fur, toward its crown. Cold as glass, and then warm and soft. The breath on my face smells like sawdust.

It is not tame yet.

Art by Adam S. Doyle

Text by Lucie MacAulay