There was once a dappled grey horse that loved to run and loved to race. He was very fast. Not as fast as the wind that blows trees over and lifts roofs off houses, but certainly he was as quick as the wind that chases leaves up the road and steals people's hats and makes the rain come slashing down almost horizontal to the ground.

Here at the beginning of the story the grey horse had not an inkling of how fast he might be. The discovery of how magnificently fleet his feet were is a significant part, a sizeable thematic chunk, of what this story is about.

The horse was young and had done very little running, largely because the paddock he lived in was very small. Small and smelly. Smelly because the farmer and his family not only emptied their bucket of food scraps into the top corner of it—plop plop plop—but also, when they couldn’t be bothered carrying the toilet bucket to the river or to the bottom of the long yard they emptied it beside the food scraps. The horse was expected to eat the food scraps. He got nowt else but weeds and grass which usually tasted better. The food scraps often got mixed up with the contents of the toilet bucket, which wasn't nice at all.

The paddock wasn't wide enough or long enough for the horse to manage more than a trot before bumping into a fence. Consequently he plodded around with his head down, snuffling the same stones he’d snuffled yesterday and avoiding the slop at the top of the paddock until he got so hungry he had to eat it.

The other animals on the farm weren’t friendly. Their lives were hard. The farmer was mean. He worked the animals to exhaustion. Tired and irritable they never bothered to say hello to the grey horse. They rarely acknowledged him.

The farm stood at the foot of a range of mountains. The bottom half of the mountains was covered in jungle. The top half was covered in snow. In the jungle there lived animals of all kinds and there grew all sorts of plants, far too many of either to count on the toes and fingers of a school full of children, especially if the children were fidgety, as most children are. On the snow covered part of the mountains there lived condors and mountain lions and there grew short, angry bushes and vines whose fruit was bitter.

A nanny goat lived on the farm. She was old but her grey eyes were clear and bright. Her hair was white and spiky like the whiskers on an old man’s chin. On her bony head were large, curved horns, like the roots of an ancient tree. The horns seemed threatening even when the nanny goat was asleep. They were a splendid deterrent to bad tempered people and mischievous children.

The nanny goat considered eating a bothersome chore. She was so skinny that her skeleton was as visible as her horns. Despite her age she was extremely strong. Her eating habits were the secret of her strength. People eat too much. This makes them sad and kills them. The nanny goat was not afflicted thus.

“That miserable goat never gives us any milk,” the farmer’s wife said on more than one occasion.

“That’s because it doesn’t eat,” the farmer replied.

“What good is a goat that gives us no milk? I want goat’s cheese on my toast,” the farmer’s wife muttered. She had a voice like a cactus and she always seemed to be in shadow even when standing in direct sunlight. “We should eat the goat.”

“There’s no meat on it,” the farmer said. “It costs us nothing and it keeps the other animals in line.”

“We could make a chess set out of its horns,” the farmer’s wife said, turning her head away, not wanting to see the condescending sneer on her husband’s face.

The farmer looked down his nose at his wife and sniffed. Neither of them knew how to play chess or was inclined to learn.

The grey horse and the nanny goat were aware of each other but didn’t fraternise. They didn’t get the opportunity. The farmer and his wife didn’t allow fraternisation. “Not on my watch,” wasn’t the sort of thing the farmer would say, but if he did “You never watch anything” was the sort of sardonic reply his wife would give back. The horse and the goat were not what you would call friends. Yet.

The grey horse worked hard, all day every day, carrying things, pulling a plough, towing a rickety wagon loaded with rocks or firewood or sacks of grain or heads of corn or bales of hay. Often, either perched on top of the rocks or wood or corn or grain or hay, or travelling in the wagon when it wasn’t loaded, trying not to get splinters in their bottoms and their hands and their knees, would be one or two or more of the farmer’s horrible children, the boys as fat as frogs, like their mother, and the girls as thin as sticks, like their father. Their names aren’t important. The children liked each other as much as they liked everything and everyone else. That is, not a lot. They bickered and pulled each another’s hair and twisted each other’s ears and noses. They threw sticks and stones at the grey horse as it plodded along in front of them, towing the wagon, head hanging, tail occasionally swishing to remove a bitey buzzy thing from it’s flanks. The children travelled in the wagon because they were lazy. The farmer rarely disiplined them. He liked how nasty and brittle they were. Occasionally he might shout at them to stop bickering, to get down, to use their legs, to stop throwing sticks and stones at the horse. He did this not to improve the characters of his children but because he liked shouting, and although he cared nothing for the horse’s well-being he couldn’t afford to have the animal suffer injury as it did a lion’s share of the work on the farm. To replace the grey horse was beyond the mean farmer’s means.

There’s nothing fair about “the lion’s share”. Putting “the lion’s share” and “work” in the same breath is potty and is oxymoronic. Lions do very little work. The lion’s share of the work would be close to none at all. Lionesses do the work. Lions lie around licking themselves, wondering why they didn’t invent mirrors. The lion’s share isn’t a bad metaphor for greed and laziness and entitlement. Lions certainly take “their” share and most of everybody else’s, which is why they’re lauded in capitalist/patriarchal societies.

People’s hearts start out pink. We’re all born from love and know everything there is to know about it when we arrive in the world. The heart of a person treated badly enough for long enough, a heart that doesn’t learn love, or, to be more precise, learns to forget love will never actually turn black, as fables and pirate stories would have you believe. The hearts of those who’ve forgotten love turn a gooey grey/brown colour. But there is always some pink in them. A heart with no pink in it cannot beat. Having said that we’ll continue to use the term black-heart here for its piquancy, and because cliches are useful.

Black-hearted people are best avoided unless your own heart is a ruddy vibrant pink. It’s not impossible to mend a black heart but some say only saints should try. Other people say there aren’t any saints anymore so just forget about the black-hearted people's hearts ever getting pinker. They’re wrong, of course, about there not being any saints anymore. And they’re wrong about only saints being able to re-pinken black-hearts. People whose hearts have turned black (or some shade of grey/brown) over time are not, sadly and unfortunately, uncommon.

On the day the farmer was born his father took one look at him and decided he was rotten. “We ought to leave you on top of a mountain for the lions to eat,” the farmer’s father whispered, looking warily into the crib. The farmer’s heart was a ruddy pink until that moment. His father’s first words to him, the lack of love in them, at once put grey blotches on the farmer’s heart, blotches that would spread and grow and cover all but the smallest pink bits.

The farmer’s father was a big man with a moustache like an anaconda. The dirt of the land was worn deep into his hands, hands calloused like a rhinoceros’s hide. A hundred crinkly wrinkles radiated out from the farmer's father's bright eyes. The farmer’s father wore braces to keep his trousers up. He didn’t trust belts. “They make breathing difficult,” he told his wife when she gave him a belt for a birthday present. “And belts make me fart,” he said later to no one but himself. The belt had been expensive. Family meals were smaller for a while. The farmer’s father’s wife’s heart shrank a little and perhaps lost just a little of its pink when the farmer’s father turned up his nose at the belt she’d put so much thought into and saved so long to buy. He wore it once then it went into a drawer and never came out again. "Serve you right if you catch those braces on something and your pants fall down," the farmer's father's wife said. There was no malice in the way she said it. There was never any animosity between them. The farmer's father's braces, as much as they did flap about, never caught anything but the wind or the eyes of passing butterflies.

Gazing, perplexed, into the crib the farmer’s father made a clucking sound and squeezed the brand new cheek of his brand new boy. The baby cried as if an ant in his nappy had bitten his bottom. “I’d leave you for the beasts to eat," the father smiled, "but your mother wouldn’t approve.”

The farmer’s father didn’t leave his son on a mountainside for lions to eat. The baby would grow up to inherit all of his father’s land and none of his father’s cheer.

In years to come the farmer’s mother’s heart was darkened by wishing on occasion that she’d never borne such a brittle, spiteful child. In her prayers at night she asked God what she’d done to deserve such a boy. She asked if the son might be made kind, or might have a bit of warmth put inside him, or failing that if he might be taken away to school, or to work, or to fight in a war. And then she’d bite her tongue and cry and wish she’d never asked for such things. She asked for forgiveness and decided she was a bad mother and it must be her fault that the boy was such a rotter.

When the farmer was a teenager his father’s big body became too worn out to work. The big man sat in a chair under a tree beside the farmhouse where he stayed, his eyes growing dimmer and his breath getting shorter. The breath he had left he used to converse in a whisper with the spirits of trees. He was sometimes saddened to find a curse on his tongue, muttered against whatever ill-humoured spirits had bequeathed him such sour progeny. There was enough light left in the farmer's father's eyes by which he might watch his son with mistrust and a deep sadness, a sadness that had arrived when his son was born, a sadness he'd never been able to resolve or understand, a sadness he’d always felt guilt for.

The father had done what he could to teach his son the right way to run things but the son thought he knew better. The son was set on ways that required less work and would make more money. “You can’t take more from the land than the land is willing to give,” the farmer’s father said. The farmer thought this was rubbish.

When the farmer's father died the farmer buried him at the farthest corner of the farm. The farmer had always treated his mother like a bag of odd socks. When the father died the farmer shunted her from corner to corner, a sad, inconvenient lump he couldn't throw away. When they get old mothers need almost as much love as babies do. Raising her son had tarnished her heart, turning it grey faster than her hair. She was aware of the greying of her heart. It made her ashamed and unhappy, as did the very existence of her son. With her husband gone, rather than let her heart turn black, she died as soon as she could. Had her heart turned black she would have died anyway: a black heart, as mentioned earlier, cannot beat. Refusing to eat more than twice a week—something about which her son made no complaint—she left the farm to its fate, dying a year after her husband.

The farmer found a wife in a village nearby, a girl as nasty as he was, with eyes close together and knock-knees and a loud, shrill voice like a furious seagull. They had six children, all bar one as cruel and spiteful as mum and dad. One of the children was a cheerful, friendly boy. Unable to understand him the farmer and his wife ignored him. He was taunted and tortured by his siblings for his odd softness and his gaiety. He ran away as soon he was big enough to work a plow.

The farmer worked the land hard and heartlessly. Under his loveless hand the crops and the trees produced abundant yields for a handful of years. The farmer bought more animals and clothes for his family. He made the farmhouse bigger and the well deeper. He was the envy of the other farmers in the valley. The farmer cursed his grandfather for not claiming the whole valley. When he was still a boy he had said to his father: “Grandfather was the first to come here wasn’t he?”

“He was,” the farmer’s father nodded, looking down at his son, not surprised to see the cold flash in his son’s eyes, wondering where the question was leading.  

“Grandfather should have taken the whole valley,” the boy said, looking out across the fields to a line of smoke casually making its way to who-knew-where from the chimney of a neighbouring farmhouse. 

His father laughed. “And how was your grandfather supposed to work the whole valley? Just him and his wife and me? The valley is huge.” 

“Maybe grandfather was lazy?” the son replied. His father shook his head at that and lit his pipe and watched a flock of cranes sail across the sky.

The land grew tired as the farmer’s father had said it would. Crop yields dwindled. The farm produced hardly enough to sell, sometimes barely enough to feed the farmer and his family, let alone the animals. Like everything else in the world land needs to be nurtured and respected. The farmer’s father had understood this. He had danced with the land. He sang to it, cajoled it, gave it time to breathe, to regenerate, to rest when it was tired. He listened to the land.

Long after the farmer’s father was dead, when the farmer’s teeth were getting long, one of the two mares the farmer had owned since they were foals died. Shocked by the loss of her sister and moreso by the doubling of her work load overnight the second mare died shortly thereafter. Horses are expensive. The farmer didn’t want to pay for one but he couldn’t haul the wagon or pump the well himself, his wife wouldn’t and his children were useless, or so it suited them to have him believe. The farmer went shopping for the cheapest scrabbly nag he could find. A neighbour offered him the dappled grey horse for next to nothing. The word neighbour does not, as you might be inclined to hope, have its origins as an epithet for a boring person who makes a noise like a horse. The dappled grey horse didn’t have a pleasant life. He got up early, worked hard all day, ate very little and was miserable most of the time. In his heart was a longing he didn’t understand for something he couldn’t name. Friendship, comfort and adventure mean little to the friendless and comfortless who know only drudgery and routine.

The farmer’s family were cruel to the animals on the farm but to the dappled grey horse they were beastly, perhaps because though obviously sad he was kind-hearted. The grey horse never complained or resisted. The dogs on the farm sometimes bit the children when warning growls weren’t enough and the mule and the nanny goat had been known to lash out with a well aimed hoof when the treatment they received was particularly bad. But the grey horse never once bit the children or kicked the farmer or his wife when they were intolerably mean or punished the grey horse in ways he didn’t deserve. Sometimes he was treated so badly he thought he might die, but he never retaliated.

The horse pulled a heavy plough through rocky fields. He pulled a heavy wagon piled high with produce, often with the extra weight of the farmer’s spiteful children and their nasty friends who didn’t like to walk from farm to market when they didn’t have to. They thought it was fun to whip the horse and cut his skin with sticks and flint. 

In the summer, when no rain fell to water the crops, the horse had to work the pump that drew water up from a deep well. For hours each day he puffed and plodded round and round in the same worn, muddy groove, pulling the arm of a pump that sucked water up from deep in the ground. One end of a heavy chain was attached to a smelly, leather harness on the horse’s back. The other end of the chain was attached to the arm of a big rusty iron wheel that went round as the horse pulled it. The pump groaned and rumbled and wheezed like a miserable monster. The chain chaffed the horse’s flanks where hair no longer grew and angry red welts were permanent. At night the echoes of the clanking chain and its monstrous rumblings rang in the grey horse’s dreams.

As far as the farmer was concerned he owned the dappled grey horse and all the other farm animals and was entitled to treat them as he saw fit. The farmer thought it was a shame that slavery was no longer allowed. There was so much farm work to be done and the farm made so little money that he could hardly afford to pay labourers. Slaves would make life more manageable. The dappled grey horse didn’t know what manumission or slavery were. He knew life was hard and joyless but had never entertained thoughts of running away or of not doing what was demanded of him.    

The horse lived in a dirty barn that leaked when it rained and it rained a lot. The barn was freezing cold in winter and boiling hot in summer. There was a smell in the barn like the smell that hits you when you open a lunchbox that’s been sitting on a wall in the garden in the sun for a week, a lunchbox containing food that's turned into something squishy and awful that makes even flies nervous.

Though he ate animals often and thanklessly and relied on them to do hard work, the farmer didn't like them, he hated them even. And of all the animals in the world the farmer hated, he hated horses most of all. As trusty and hardworking and uncomplaining as the dappled grey horse unfailingly was he was given just enough food to survive and no more. The horse never had breakfast and was always hungry. He was too hot or too cold, and often got sick. The farmer and the farmer's children whipped the horse to make him work harder and harder still. Sometimes the cuts in the horse's skin made by the whip became infected, leading to fevers and more sickness. Sometimes the horse was so sick he could hardly stand up, but the farmer kicked him and whipped him until he stumbled out to work.

One day the horse, delirious with fever, collapsed in a field in front of the plough he was pulling. The farmer, whipped and kicked him. “Get up!” he screamed. “Get back to work.” But the unconscious animal didn’t respond, didn’t flinch. Disgusted, the farmer unshackled the plough and trudged back through the muddy field to the farmhouse, leaving the dappled grey horse lying in the mud as the rain started falling and the sun went down and the temperature started to drop.