Page 187 - Exile-ebook

186 AN EXILE OF THE MIND WHERE THE COWS SLEEP AT NIGHT 187

riders into the water. On one holiday
visit, an undeterred Marcel, told
not to yell Geronimo, trotted off on
Toby at a moderate gait that quickly
escalated into a galloping frenzy.
Toby kicked and lashed hooves in
all directions, crashing through the
whipping branches of trees. Marcel
was flung like an arrow head first
over a fence as Toby abruptly came
to a halt before it. This sixteen-hand
monster galloped away, backfiring
kicks and farts over the pasture on
an earth-shake of ground.
Toby didn’t quite fit in with
our harmonious way of life at J.P. making Charlie say cheese.
Tanglewood. We sold him to an
endurance rider who would use Chickens, guinea fowl, ducks and
Toby’s unbounded energy on rugged geese occupied large runs down by
mountain tracks. the spring. One Christmas, chickens
Bogtrotter, an eccentric English- were needed for the Yuletide feast
man and a friend of Anna’s from and I was sent with an axe to do
Sydney, bought flood-prone land the dreaded chop. The chickens ran
nearby and built a shack out of towards me clucking and pecking
discarded corrugated iron and tree at my boots to say hello. I retreated
branches. only to be sent back later to finish
He had driven a cab in London the job.
where finding a parking space, when Using a less traumatic method of
the call of nature made itself known, execution I held them one by one in
was as rare as finding fleas on the my arms, covering their beaks and
Queen’s corgis. He’d had the bright humming a lullaby until they fell
idea of peeing through a tube via a asleep and then finally ‘expired’.
hole in the cab floor while on the move
—when he didn’t have passengers. Tandy reflected in the spring.