“Engine Horse” from The Animal Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder
by Patricia Highsmith
***
What’s a human being to
think when a friendly, taken for granted animal turns deadly? And I’m not
talking about Cujo. Before Stephen
King ever penned his 1981 story about a big dog turned rabid killer, Patricia Highsmith was turning her misanthropic eyes on a whole bevy of animals who took far more
rational revenge on the often-vicious humans around them. Readers of
Highsmith’s 1975 story collection, The Animal Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder will never view pets, farm animals,
zoos or circuses the same way again.
In common with Highsmith’s
more widely-known thrillers such as The
Talented Mr. Ripley, the murderers are more winning than their victims.
Among the most sympathetic is the murderess du
jour: Fanny, the big, slow-witted plow horse who lives only to eat, sleep
and work. That is, until the day a little grey kitten enters her stable and
claims her gigantic heart.
“(That day) Fanny had not
done anything that she could remember except walk with the woman Bess to the
water tank and back again. Fanny had a long period of munching in daylight,
before she lay down with a grunt to sleep. Her vast haunch and rib cage, well covered
with fat and muscle, hit the bed of hay like a carefully lowered barrel. . .
The little grey kitten, which Fanny could now see more clearly, came and curled
herself up in the reddish feathers behind (her) left hoof. . . The mare was
somewhat pleased. Such a dainty little creature! That size, that weight that
was nothing at all!”
But in the farmhouse all is not well. Farm owner Bess Gibson’s only relative, her grandson Harry and his wife have come to visit
– and to talk Bess into giving him money for a business venture he has in mind.
“Gramma, it’s as simple as
this,” Harry says. “I need sixty thousand dollars to buy my half. . . but if I
can’t put up my part in a few days, Gramma – or can’t give a promise of the
money, my chances are gone. I’ll pay you back, Gramma, naturally. But this is
the chance of a lifetime!”
Bess is unimpressed, both
with smooth-talking Harry and his “pretty and silly” wife, Marylou. And as
Harry’s chances of wheedling money out of Bess dwindle, he begins to plan other
ways to get the money he wants. “I’m thinking,” he tells
Marylou, “if Gramma had something like a hip injury, you know – those things
old people always get. . . she’d have to stay in a town, wouldn’t she – if her
couldn’t get around?”
And Harry has thought of
just the way to provide that “accident” that will force his grandmother to sell
the farm – “going on a picnic, the way she says she does, you know? With the
horse and wagon. . . then the wagon turns over somewhere. . . ?.
It all seems simple, that
is until Harry, awkwardly attempting to harness the “engine horse” for the
wagon tramples on and kills the kitten.
Picking the dead kitten up
by its tail, he throws it far away into the field. And Fanny, the engine horse,
sees. She at first follows Harry docilely, but her awareness of the connection
between him and the kitten’s death comes, “slowly and ponderously, even more
slowly than she plodded across the meadow.” And Harry, unknowingly, leads the big
horse toward his own doom.
For most of her life, Fort Worth, Texas, native Highsmith remained relatively unknown in the United States,
even after Alfred Hitchcock’s film version of her first novel, Strangers on a Train. When her American
agent told her, as biographer Joan Schenkar reports in The Talented Miss Highsmith, that the reason her books weren’t
selling in the United States was because there was “no one likeable” in them,
Highsmith replied, “Perhaps it is because I don’t like anyone. My last books
may be about animals.” At least one of those, The Animal Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder, was.
(Next Friday, Adventure
classics begins a November of fantasy with E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros.)
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