Boyle The Crazy Hunter

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78227-947-1
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

At 17, Nan wants to leave the family farm and go to study. Caught between her powerful mother and yielding, drunken father, she absorbs the tensions of their divided household and dotes on her new gelding, a gift from her father. When a sudden accident leaves the horse blind, Nan's mother insists he must be put down, initiating a power struggle that brings the family's conflicts explosively to the fore.First published in 1938, The Crazy Hunter is an electrifying short novel - sharply observed, psychologically astute and morally complex. Written in lush, entrancing prose, it is the finest work by a significant modernist writer.

Kay Boyle (1902-1992) was an American writer, educator and political activist. Following her youth and education in Philadelphia, Cincinnati and New York, Boyle moved to France in 1923, where she would remain until 1941. She became an important figure in the literary scene there, publishing in small magazines alongside Hemingway, Joyce and Stein. She was twice awarded Guggenheim fellowships and won two O. Henry Awards for best short story of the year.On returning to the US, Boyle continued writing and worked as a foreign correspondent for the New Yorker. A victim of 1950s McCarthyism, Boyle was blacklisted from most major magazines, and in 1963 she took a teaching job in San Francisco. She became increasingly involved in political activism and was once imprisoned alongside Joan Baez for a protest at the height of the Vietnam War. A fierce advocate for justice and equality until the end of her life, Boyle died in California aged 90.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Boyle, Kay

Leseproben

2

After she had opened the stable door and let the sun run in she stood watching him an instant: his head was high but quiet, his ears alive, his mahogany flank gleamed richly in the light from the part-opened door. Out of the shallow dimness of the boxes she could hear the groom’s voice, continuous in the soothing swageing words of horse-talk as she crossed the floor, hearing it steady as water murmuring while she crossed the separately rounded and hoof-scarred timbers to where the hunter stood beyond his gate. His loins and quarters shone bright and firm and he stood on all four feet, without a hoof cocked, even though at ease. “You Brigand, you troublemaker,” she said half-aloud and he turned his head on his shoulder to watch her come inside and close the latch behind her, and then he shifted to one side. At his head she raised her bare arm and laid her hand, gloved to the wrist, beneath his mane.

Now the delusion of darkness was clearing, ebbing fast, as her eyes altered, towards light: she could see the knots in the boards of the stall and the mare’s head and neck beyond and her full ripe dappled shoulder over the partitions that stood between, and the strings of white hair, like a witch’s, hanging on the brood-mare’s neck. “I like this horse, Apby,” the girl said, with her hand laid under the hunter’s mane. She stood looking beyond into the clearing obscurity at the mare’s head and the unseen crouching groom, saying it to his goodafternoon and the voice’s low ceaseless cajoling. The windows were open the stable’s length and the air was clean with avenues of myriad sparkling light running with sun to the forage of oaten straw and striking there and igniting it like flame. “Apby, I like him. I like the way he went yesterday. He’s a good horse,” she said. She was wearing breeches, old ones, too tight and darned across the knees, and a sport shirt undone at the neck. The gloves with the buttons missing and the brown leather wearing through white at the fingers’ ends were turned inside out at her bare wrists and flapped back loose across her hands.

“Yes, Miss,” said the groom, not lifting his voice to say it but letting the sound go murmuring on. “Bees swarming all the morning kept them nervy. They was all over the windows and wood.” So hush now, so be still now, it went on gently, gently to the brood-mare as he squatted beside her using the paring-knife on her unshod foot. “Out yonder the wall was black with them, thick,” he said in the same low, tempered, wooing tone. “They didn’t like them, did you, lady? Oh, not at all, they didn’t like them. I got them away with sulphur, burning it here and there in dishes outside and in.”

“Apby, what do you think of him as a horse?” the girl said. “What do you think of this animal? He’s turned out to be mine.” She stood looking into the horse’s dark clear eye with the lash, thick, black, fernlike, brushing on the lid, and the blood turned warm, the marrow melted softly in her from the power of the delicate, quick body breathing near. “What do you think of this upstart, this Brigand with his bony face?” she said. The smell of his coat was sweet and the neck’s arch sprang firm and meaty underneath her hand.

“I will say he’s got a good rein,” the groom’s voice began saying warily from the brood-mare’s side. “He’s got quite a bit in front of him, and that gives a horse an air. But I wouldn’t—”

“He’s got a foolish head, my fine horse has,” said the girl with love, and she pulled the near ear gently down and drew the pointed fur tip of it across her face. And now, as if just recognizing the words the groom’s voice had shaped or just receiving now their sense on some vague undulation of retarded hearing, she stopped short and stared across the stalls’ partitions at the mare’s head and shoulder and the unseen groom. “But you wouldn’t what?” she said. “You wouldn’t what?”

“It might be that I would never have thought of picking him out for a buy,” the groom’s voice went on. “But if he’s stag-faced, as Mrs. Lombe has it, it don’t hurt him none for riding. No one’s going to ask nothing else of him, the way I understand it.” He did not look up, the head, the soiled brown cap lowered over the bent foot as he worked at the mare’s side, the same gentle assuaging murmur of contemporation crooning: “If he runs to hollowness towards the nose, there’s no foal going to bear it on. Whatever his faults are or his points either, it stops with him there and no harm come to, at least the way I look at it.”

She stood with her hand stopped under the black hairs of the mane still, her obsessed rapt gaze moving from the ear’s soft flick and the passive brow down the nasal bones to the nostril, her own dream-stupored, half-slumbering eye level with the horse’s proud soft brilliant eye. So this is how they think of you, my horse, she said in silence to him. She lifted her other hand and touched the wide hard cheekbone’s blade. Not my first horse or my second or even the third, but this time my horse in protest, my hunter in defiance; not with race and nervousness flickering down your crest and loins, but my bony-legged monster to gentle, to murmur alone to in fortification of my father’s errors; the substance of identity and revolt and love to hold to, until I can see you like the oriflamme of what is nothing more violent than Candy and me walking down a street arm in arm together in another country, she said, the gloved hand moving on his neck under the mane’s coarse glossy hair. With one finger she lifted the velvet of his lip and looked at the upper teeth laid bare in his mouth, breathing the warm hay-sweetened breath while the physical stab of love thrust in her. He drew his head up from her hand, but tractably, the nostril opening dry as silk and rosy and the hairs quivering on his vulnerable unmottled lip.

“Apby, what age would you give him?” she said, watching in grave passionate pride how his teeth met evenly, touching one on the other almost vertically.

“I’d give him off five,” the groom said from the other box, and the girl looked up in sudden sharpness and Brigand’s ears flicked on his lifted head.

“Off five!” she said. “What rubbish, Apby! Have you taken the trouble to look at him instead of just making up your mind about him without— Look here, his side front teeth are hardly cut. I’d say he’s just off three.”

“Come first July I’d give him rising six,” the groom said, the peaceful, persistently assuaging voice unaltered. “He’s cutting his tush and that’s what’s maybe thrown you off,” but when he heard her jerk the bridle down off the peg he stood up in the mare’s box. “I’ll have him ready for you straight away, Miss, if you’re taking him out,” he said.

“No, I’ll do it,” she said shortly. “I don’t see how in the world you handle him at all, feeling about him the way you do.” Her hand in its glove lifted the hunter’s hair and drew the forelock free of the browband onto his face and buckled the cheek-pieces tighter, working in quick stubborn rebuke. “You’d let them tell you anything and believe it, true or not,” she said. She did not look for an instant over the box’s panel to where the groom stood, the dwarfed arms hanging from the waistcoat’s cramp and the blunt soiled fingers turning the paring-knife in harried, slow humility. He saw the sun coming through the open window onto her hair and head as she loosened the throat-lash on the horse’s neck: the dark soft longish hair with the strong light on it and the pale face and throat and the mouth’s color warm but pallid and he began saying in expiation:

“They’re up to all kinds of tricks you’d never suspect if you wasn’t onto them. Copers’ll file off the seven-year notch and nobody the wiser if they get hold of a buyer what wouldn’t know. You got to keep your eyes open, I tell you, you can’t trust anybody, you just got to look sharp.” He stood watching her from the other box and turning the paring-knife in his fingers, as if just to keep on talking no matter what the words were would be enough to set it right at last. “Bishoping’s another coper’s trick,” he said. “They’ll level the teeth off short and gouge the centers out and blacken them with caustic if they think it’ll sell a ten-year old for a six,” he said, and then he said abruptly and painfully: “I didn’t mean no offense about his age, Miss,” standing with the brown cloth cap turned back to front and lending him the look now of a tough stunted gladiator halted in the arena, uncharioted, bewildered, and unarmed. When he said this to her over the box’s panel, she raised her lids and looked with the heavy, seemingly drugged wide-spaced eyes across the crib-bitten wood at him, the eyes’ substance transparent as glass in the sunlight and clear bright icy blue.

“All...