Swimming with Horses Read online

  Copyright © Oakland Ross, 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

  This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. All other characters in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover image: shutterstock.com/Fotokostic

  Printer: Webcom

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Ross, Oakland, 1952-, author

  Swimming with horses / Oakland Ross.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-4597-4354-0 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-4597-4355-7 (PDF).-- ISBN 978-1-4597-4356-4 (EPUB)

  I. Title.

  PS8585.O8404S95 2019 C813’.6 C2018-903352-5

  C2018-903353-3

  1 2 3 4 5 23 22 21 20 19

  We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Ontario, through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and Ontario Creates, and the Government of Canada.

  Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

  Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

  — J. Kirk Howard, President

  The publisher is not responsible for websites or their content unless they are owned by the publisher.

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  VISIT US AT

  dundurn.com

  @dundurnpress

  dundurnpress

  dundurnpress

  Dundurn

  3 Church Street, Suite 500

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  M5E 1M2

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  ONE - Sam: Ontario, Spring 1963

  TWO - Sam: Ontario, Spring 1963

  THREE - Jack: South Africa, Winter 1962

  FOUR - Sam: Ontario, Summer 1963

  FIVE - Hilary: South Africa, Winter 1962

  SIX - Sam: Ontario, Summer 1963

  SEVEN - Hilary: South Africa, Winter 1962

  EIGHT - Sam: Ontario, Summer 1963

  NINE - Muletsi: South Africa, Winter 1962

  TEN - Sam: Ontario, Summer 1963

  ELEVEN - Hilary: South Africa, Winter 1962

  TWELVE - Sam: Ontario, Summer 1963

  THIRTEEN - Hilary: South Africa, Winter 1962

  PART TWO

  FOURTEEN - Sam: Ontario, Summer 1963

  FIFTEEN - Hilary: South Africa, Winter 1962

  SIXTEEN - Sam: Ontario, Summer 1963

  SEVENTEEN - Jack: South Africa, Winter 1962

  EIGHTEEN - Sam: Ontario, Summer 1963

  NINETEEN - Jack: South Africa, Winter 1962

  TWENTY - Sam: Ontario, Summer 1963

  TWENTY-ONE - Hilary: South Africa, Winter 1962

  TWENTY-TWO - Sam: Ontario, Summer 1963

  TWENTY-THREE - Hilary: South Africa, Winter 1962

  TWENTY-FOUR - Sam: Ontario, Summer 1963

  TWENTY-FIVE - Jack: South Africa, Winter 1962

  TWENTY-SIX - Sam: Ontario, Summer 1963

  TWENTY-SEVEN - Hilary: South Africa, Winter 1962

  TWENTY-EIGHT - Sam: Ontario, Summer 1963

  PART THREE

  TWENTY-NINE - Sam: Ontario, Summer 1963

  THIRTY - Hilary: South Africa, Winter 1962

  THIRTY-ONE - Sam: Ontario, Summer 1963

  THIRTY-TWO - Hilary: South Africa, Winter 1962

  THIRTY-THREE - Sam: Ontario, Summer 1963

  THIRTY-FOUR - Hilary: South Africa, Winter 1962

  THIRTY-FIVE - Sam: Ontario, Summer 1963

  THIRTY-SIX - Jack: South Africa, Winter 1962

  THIRTY-SEVEN - Sam: Ontario, Summer 1963

  THIRTY-EIGHT - Muletsi: South Africa, Winter 1962

  THIRTY-NINE - Sam: Ontario, Summer 1963

  FORTY - Jack: South Africa, Winter 1962

  FORTY-ONE - Sam: Ontario, Summer 1963

  FORTY-TWO - Hilary: South Africa, Winter 1962

  FORTY-THREE - Jack: Basutoland, Winter 1962

  FORTY-FOUR - Hilary: South Africa, Winter 1962

  FORTY-FIVE - Jack: Basutoland, Winter 1962

  FORTY-SIX - Muletsi: South Africa, Winter 1962

  FORTY-SEVEN - Hilary: South Africa, Winter 1962

  FORTY-EIGHT - Hilary: Basutoland–South Africa–Canada, Winter 1962

  FORTY-NINE - Sam: Ontario, Summer 1963

  PART FOUR

  FIFTY - Sam: Ontario, 1963–1990

  FIFTY-ONE - Sam: En Route to South Africa 1994

  FIFTY-TWO - Sam: South Africa, Summer 1994

  FIFTY-THREE - Sam: South Africa, Summer 1994

  FIFTY-FOUR - Sam: South Africa, Summer 1994

  FIFTY-FIVE - Sam: Ontario, Spring 1994

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  OF RELATED INTEREST

  In loving memory of Doris Mary Ross

  No hill without gravestones, no valley without shadows.

  — SOUTH AFRICAN PROVERB

  PROLOGUE

  THEY FOUND QUINTON VASCO’S body only a day after he went missing. Still clad in a black business suit, his corpse turned up amid a large field of alfalfa grass, a couple of hundred yards north of Number Four Sideroad in Kelso County. The site was not far from a trail that local teens had used in former days as a sort of lovers’ lane.

  By this time, the police had discovered Vasco’s abandoned BMW nearby. It seemed he had walked from the vehicle into the field, entering by means of the padlocked gates; it was determined he had a key. He then proceeded on foot to the site of his death, evidently accompanied by a second person, his killer. There was no sign of a struggle.

  Some said it was fitting that Vasco owned the property where he was murdered, although I can’t imagine what difference that would make, either to him or to anyone else, unless it was for the view. The view was stunning. Still, it all came to the same thing in the end. The man was dead, shot twice in the side of the head from very close range — this, according to the police report. The police also said there was something odd about the bullets that killed him. Their calibre — nine millimetres by eighteen millimetres — was pretty unusual, albeit not unknown. That summer, the Evanton detachment of the Ontario Provincial Police had received several baffling reports of local livestock being shot while grazing, invariably with bullets of this same unfamiliar configuration. Possibly, the killer had been getting in some target practice.

  Many people would later insist that Vasco’s death must have been part of some deadly international plot, rife with intrigue and espionage. He was the inventor, after all, of the GC-45 howitzer, a massive cannon that was eventually sold to the white supremacist government in South Africa. But the actual verdict proved to be far more mundane. Kelso was a quiet region, you see, with little crime and few troublemakers. When acts of malfeasance did take place, suspicion tended to round pretty quickly upon a select group of known delinquents, a s
hort list that included a certain Bruce Gruber. He was a grade eight dropout who worked as an apprentice mechanic at Weintrub’s Garage over in Hatton. He had a mean temper and had run afoul of the law more than once. He was not noted for his keen intellect.

  What was more, Bruce Gruber confessed his guilt almost at once, and he stuck to his tale like a dog. He insisted that he shot Quinton Vasco “because I hated him,” which made sense if you know anything about human nature at all. It was said that Gruber acted in a jealous rage, which seemed on the surface to be entirely plausible.

  All of this and more came out in the news and kept everyone jabbering for weeks. A murder? In Kelso County? Nothing like it had ever happened before. True, rumours would begin to spread toward the end of that summer about an alleged rape, a terrible business said to have involved that nice young Odegaard girl. Leslie was her name. For my part, I happen to have a fair idea of what was done to Leslie on that night, even if few others do. I may even have saved her from suffering worse harm. For almost everyone else, the episode was a matter of hearsay and conjecture — unproven and easily forgotten. Besides, the Odegaards quickly sold their store in Hatton and set out for parts unknown. People stopped talking about them before very long. I don’t believe that anyone was ever punished for the assault on that poor child, or not officially. Still, some higher form of justice may have been at work because, one way or another, Bruce Gruber went to jail.

  As for the object of Bruce’s seemingly unrequited passion, she absconded, too. The South African girl, they called her. Colonel Barker drove her to the airport on the day that followed Quinton Vasco’s death, even before the man’s body was found. She left no message or, anyway, none for me. She just marched aboard an airplane and disappeared. Good riddance, everyone said. Her departure merely confirmed what they had believed all along.

  That girl was trouble.

  And she was. I know she was. I know that better than anyone.

  PART ONE

  ONE

  Sam

  Ontario, Spring 1963

  HER NAME WAS HILARY ANSON, and she came up from South Africa in the late spring of 1963, armed with a Russian-made Makarov pistol that had been given to her by Nelson Mandela, or so she said. She was all of eighteen years old when she arrived in Canada — an unholy terror, according to the rumours, which were invariably lurid and quite possibly true. Her impending arrival had been grist for the mill long before she showed up in Kelso, deep in the horse country northwest of Toronto, the land where I was raised.

  Supposedly, she was to remain for the summer, or possibly longer, in order to serve penance for certain heinous wrongs committed in her home country. The details were unclear. All that was known for certain was that she was trouble and that she was going to work as a groom at the Colonel Barkers’ place, a rambling property with a stone farmhouse on the Second Line not far south of the hunt club. Some relative of Mrs. Barker’s lived in South Africa — in Durban, apparently — and there was some kind of family connection with Hilary Anson. No one was exactly sure what it was. As for the rumours, if even half of them were true, then the girl had already endured vastly more outrage and scandal than I have known in all my life, and I am now forty-six. I was fifteen then.

  “Durban …?” said my mother. She wrinkled her nose. This was the first she’d heard of Hilary Anson. “Doesn’t that sound Arabian?”

  “Turban, Mother,” I said. “You’re thinking of turban. And that would be more like India. Sikhs wear turbans.”

  “Oh …? Oh yes.” She waggled her eyeglasses in the air like a schoolteacher to signal a pause in the conversation. But she soon came back to Hilary Anson. “Just think,” she said. “South Africa.”

  My father had been there once, on business of some kind. He’d gone on safari, too, and had seen a lion, two giraffes, and at least a dozen elephants, all before seven o’clock in the morning.

  “And that was just for starters,” he told us later.

  I did a presentation about it at school, featuring an out-of-focus snapshot of my father in a wide-brimmed hat slouching in the passenger seat of a Land Rover beside a bare-headed black driver. The driver had a rifle resting across his lap and was the first black man I had ever seen, or, at least, the first one who had any connection to me. Here was the black man my father had once sat beside in a Land Rover in South Africa. In the background: Kruger National Park. It was remote and exotic.

  But back to 1963. For reasons not of my own making, I came to know Hilary Anson — a.k.a. the South African girl — over the course of that summer. I believe I grew closer to her than anyone else managed to do at that time, closer even than Bruce Gruber. This might not seem like much to others, but it surely was something to me. She turned my life upside down, Hilary Anson did, and I haven’t got things righted yet, even though more than thirty years have passed since I last heard her plummy voice; last gazed at her wavy sable locks; last admired her as she sculpted smoke rings in the air with a Rothmans cigarette; last watched, transfixed, as she dove naked and on horseback into the quarry pond, down by the abandoned Colbys’ place, where the Niagara Escarpment plummets toward the Kelso River and the broad green lands beyond.

  I saw Hilary Anson before I met her. Along with my kid sister, Charlotte, I had hacked over to the hunt club in order to stable our horses there overnight, hers and mine. Our mother picked us up in our Pontiac station wagon that evening and then drove us back at six the next morning so we could water the horses, feed them, groom them, and tack them up, all before seven.

  “Come on, Della,” I said.

  I bunched the reins in my right hand and led my horse out of the barn and into the brisk spring air. Charlotte followed with Pablo, a shaggy grey pony, a Welsh and Shetland cross. Della was short for Della Street, the secretary on Perry Mason, my favourite TV program at the time. As for Della the horse, she was a smallish bay mare with handsome conformation and an honest heart. But she had delicate bones, lacked stamina, and was apt to be sluggish at times.

  On that first morning — the morning when I first saw Hilary Anson — Charlotte and I alternated holding the other’s horse so that, one at a time, we could hurry back into the tack room to change. I took my turn second and soon marched back out to the stable yard in breeches, tweed jacket, and tie. Charlotte handed me my horse’s reins, and I stood with my back to Della’s head. I twisted the stirrup iron out a quarter turn, slipped the ball of my booted left foot into the iron, pushed off twice with my right foot, and swung myself up and into the saddle, joining a dozen or so other riders, all grown-ups.

  The lemony sunshine pealed down through the wisps of morning mist, the hounds were bellowing already over at the kennel, and Colonel Barker appeared over the brow of the hunt club lane on his big half-Clydesdale named Rumpus. Colonel Barker had one sightless eye, a red moustache, and an English accent that was not really genuine; he had lived in England during the war. At his side: Hilary Anson.

  She was riding the colonel’s big chestnut stallion, the one named Club Soda, and it immediately seemed to me that only she and her horse were blessed with the gift of movement, while the rest of us were frozen in some kind of suspended animation, unable to do anything except stand back and watch as she rode by. Only then did the planet resume its customary rotation. That was what I felt the first time I saw Hilary Anson.

  I remember that the chinstrap on her helmet was undone and flapped back and forth against her right shoulder. Her houndstooth riding jacket was unbuttoned, her necktie was loose, and she kept her weight back, deep in the saddle, not even bothering to post, just soaking up her horse’s gait like a cowboy. She had a set of double reins dangling from just one hand, and the slack lengths of leather swung from side to side in time to the cadence of her horse’s stride. Her riding boots were kicked out in front of her, and her feet were at home in the stirrups. She’d have been thrown out of any decent equitation class, no questions asked.

  Oh, and about the gun, the Russian-built Makarov pistol that Hilar
y kept about her at all times. I know it was real because I saw it — she damned well pointed it at me — and also because of certain subsequent events pertaining to its use. But I don’t know if it was truly given to her by Nelson Mandela, despite her insistence that it was. On the other hand, I have read that Mandela once possessed such a weapon, apparently a gift from Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia. From what I understand, the gun is thought to be buried beneath a house in a suburb of Johannesburg, but it has never been found. Could it be that the mystery of Nelson Mandela’s missing weapon actually has its solution in a storage facility maintained by the Ontario Provincial Police, somewhere in southern Ontario? Because that’s where the Makarov is kept now. I know this for a fact. I also know that Quinton Vasco is dead and that he was shot with that same gun. And I know about those two giant howitzers — the GC-45s — hidden in the sugar bush north of Number Four Sideroad. They would later provide the focus for a major investigative series published by the Toronto Star, but I was aware of their existence long before it became public knowledge. Although I don’t know everything, I do know a lot.

  But I digress, as they say.

  On that morning when I first saw her, this far-fetched creature from South Africa reached up with her right hand, clutching an uncoiled hunting whip. She looped the thong into the air, brought her arm down fast. The lash gave an unholy crack, and Club Soda first let out with a start and then raised his spine and unleashed a buck that looked spring-loaded. Hilary Anson just laughed. She absorbed the sudden commotion with the grip of her legs and the arch of her back. She barely moved in the saddle.

  Colonel Barker said nothing, just glared straight ahead with his one good eye. The other eye was covered by a black patch, which gave him the appearance of a pirate who has lately joined the landed gentry. The colonel didn’t even glance at Charlotte or me as he and Hilary Anson rode right past us and directly around to the kennel.

  Charlotte and I remained by the stable entrance, keeping our horses as still as we could. We nodded politely and called, “Good morning,” as Tiff McDermott, the huntsman, rode out on his imposing black mare, with the cub hounds swirling and careening all around him.