I knocked the rest of that section out and shined my phone light into the space, and there was something standing in there, and I set the sledge down and called for my wife, because it was a horse.
A carousel horse. A real one, life-size, carved out of wood, standing in that walled-up cavity in our chimney with its front legs up like it was still galloping, its paint gone soft but its glass eye catching my light like it was glad to see somebody at last. A brass pole ran straight up through it. Somebody had bricked a merry-go-round horse into the wall of this house, standing up, and faced it over so careful that two sets of owners had lived here and never had the first idea.
My wife knew what it was before I did. She grew up here in Kokomo, and she remembered, from when she was a little girl, the old carousel that used to run down by the river in the park, the one they tore out and sold off for scrap in the seventies when the park went to seed. Everybody her age remembered it. It had been the best part of a hundred childhoods in this town, and then one summer it was just gone, and folks had stayed sad about it in a low quiet way for fifty years.
We got a local history buff out to look, and he confirmed it. This was one of the original horses off the Kokomo river carousel, hand-carved, more than a hundred years old. Worth a real sum of money to the right collector, he said. But that is not the part that matters. The man who owned this house back when they scrapped the carousel had worked at that park. He could not stop them tearing it down. But he could save one horse. So he bought the one his own kids had loved best out of the scrap pile, hauled it home, and hid it in the only place big enough and safe enough to keep it whole for good, right inside his own chimney, standing up, galloping in the dark.
There was a note tucked in a mason jar down at the horse feet, gone brittle. Could not save the carousel. Saved the best horse off it. Somebody someday will know what to do with him.
Well. We knew. There is a group here in town that has spent years trying to bring the river carousel back, rebuilding it piece by piece, tracking down the old horses that got scattered to auctions and attics all over the country. We called them. You should have heard the fella on the phone when I told him what was standing in my fireplace.
Our horse is the twelfth one they have recovered. He is being restored right now, his paint brought back bright, and when the new carousel opens down by the river next summer, he will be on it, going round and round in the sun with a whole new crop of Kokomo kids on his back, a hundred years old and galloping again. A man walled up a piece of this towns joy in the dark to keep it safe. We just got to be the ones who finally let him back out.