A Good Horse (23 page)

A
BAGEL TURNED OUT TO BE A ROUND ROLL, LIKE A DOUGHNUT
, but hard and not sweet. Poppy seeds turned out to be tiny black, crunchy seeds that were sprinkled on top of the bagel. Mrs. Goldman had a special wooden block that she set the bagel in. She cut it in two, toasted it, and spread it with cream cheese, then laid flat orange slices of lox on it. Lox was fish, and sort of slimy, but also very salty, and along with some sliced pineapple and melon, that was breakfast. Alexis and Barbie drank coffee, just like their parents.

Mom showed up while we were still eating, and they had her come in and sit down and have a cup of coffee. Mom said, “We really have to …,” but she sat down and received her cup, poured in the (real) cream, and took a spoonful of sugar.
“Abby has been so much fun,” said Mrs. Goldman. “We played Adverbs last night for the first time in years, and Abby made us all laugh when she did
nosily
.”

I said, “Mr. Goldman was the funniest.”

“Oh my goodness,” said Mrs. Goldman. “I’d forgotten how deeply he gets into every adverb. I am truly glad no one asked him for
mortally
!”

“How would you do that one?” said Alexis.

“I don’t think it’s really an adverb,” said Barbie. “I think it’s an adjective, like
decidedly
.”

The twins stuck their tongues out at each other.

Mrs. Goldman passed the plate of bagels to Mom and said, “These are good bagels. I went out for them early this morning.” Mom hesitated, then took half of one of the split ones. Mrs. Goldman handed her a plate, and Alexis passed her the cream cheese. She spread some on and took a bite, then said, “Hmm. That is good.”

“These are the real thing—just a little chewy. Hard to find in California, at least around here. But there’s one place.”

Barbie said to her, “The melon is good, too,” and passed her the melon. Mom took two slices and set them on her plate. The lox was gone. It was interesting to see Mom with the Goldmans, because she was pretty shy about strangers. I knew that when she first sat down, she was feeling out of place and ready to get out of there as soon as possible, but everyone was so friendly that they seemed not to notice that she didn’t have much to say, just went on with what they were already doing.

Mrs. Goldman said, “What lessons do you girls have today?”

“Banjo,” said Barbie.

“Banjo!” said Mrs. Goldman. “How did that happen?”

“I signed up behind your back. I want to branch out.”

“How much is it?” said Mrs. Goldman, but she didn’t seem angry, or even really surprised.

“It’s free. I’m trading for violin with Horton Jenkins. He thinks if he can play the fiddle, his band will be more flexible.”

“I thought they had a fiddle player,” said Alexis.

“They do, but he wants to have two fiddles on some songs.”

“Why doesn’t their fiddle player teach him?”

“Because I’m the one who wants to play the banjo.”

Mom said, “My brother plays the banjo, back in Oklahoma.”

I knew this.

“Oh!” exclaimed Barbie. “Is he good?”

“He’s fast. I stopped trying to keep up with him when I was about Abby’s age.”

“What did you play?” asked Alexis.

“We had an old mandolin,” said Mom.

I didn’t know this.

“I sang a little, too.”

It was true that when we were in church, Mom knew all the songs, and she was great on the high parts.

“Do you play anything, Abby? We could have a band.”

I shook my head.

Mom said, “Abby has a good voice, though.”

Alexis and Barbie turned toward me at the same time, and Mrs. Marx said, “You girls have plenty going on without starting a band.”

“Just sing one thing,” said Alexis. “One verse of one song.”

Silence all around the room. Mom was smiling at me. She
knew we were well practiced, from church. I bit my lips for a moment, then sang, “Old Stewball was a racehorse, and I wish he were mine. He never drank water, he always drank wine. His bridle was silver, and his mane it was gold—”

Mom came in on the high harmony, “And the worth of his saddle has never been told.”

Now Alexis and Barbie came in, too. Barbie was the low one, and Alexis was in my range, but doing a sort of counterpoint: “Well, the fairgrounds were crowded, Old Stewball was there, but the betting was heavy, on the bay and the mare.”

Now we fell silent, and Mom sang, “Well, I bet on the gray mare, and I bet on the bay.”

Then we all chimed in, “If I’d a bet on Old Stewball, I’d be a free man today!”

Then we laughed.

Alexis said, “That’s a Peter, Paul, and Mary song. I love that song.”

“Very good! Very good!” exclaimed Mrs. Goldman, “Don’t sing any more or I’ll be driving this band around day and night.” But she kept clapping.

Mom was grinning. When we left, Mrs. Goldman gave her a little kiss on the cheek and said, “Drop by anytime!”

After we were in the car, Mom said, “Well, you must have had fun.”

Before I realized what I was saying, it popped out: “I never knew you could have that much fun.”

There was a pause, and then she said, “They do seem nice.”

At home, there was plenty to do, because the Roseburys had bought Black George and they were going to pick him up late
that afternoon. They would have preferred Sunday, but that was out. It wasn’t that he needed cleaning, it was that the whole place needed cleaning, because Colonel Hawkins, Mr. Rosebury, and Sophia were all coming, and however the place looked to us, there was always the chance that it could look like a dump to them.

“Not a dump,” said Daddy, “but a working ranch rather than a showplace.”

“That’s bad enough,” said Mom. She had already mopped the kitchen floor and cleaned the stove in case they accepted her invitation for a cup of tea. Daddy had swept the barn and straightened all the racks: saddles and bridles and halters and lead ropes and blankets and pictures—you name it, it was wound up, folded, hanging straight, put away. Mom had even brushed Rusty. Dad had replaced two boards on the fence of the gelding pasture that the horses had chewed, and all in all we were acting way more impressed by Sophia than I wanted to, but it did come out—Daddy let it slip—that the Roseburys were paying “at least ten thousand dollars” for Black George.

“What do you mean, ‘at least’?”

“I mean that we get it all. Normally, there would be commissions to Jane and maybe Colonel Hawkins, and they would come out of our money, but there’s none of that.”

The good thing was that in my two days and one night at the Goldmans’ house, I had gotten used to it, so when I gave Black George one last brushing, all over, from ears to tail, and then rubbed him down with the chamois, I felt a little separated from him, as if he had already gone and only his ghost were here. I suppose that’s what Daddy meant when he talked about accepting the will of the Lord—you have had
some feelings, and you knew you had them, but you put them in a box and you put the box away. I guess that was what everyone meant by growing up, too.

In the end, though, it was Colonel Hawkins and Rodney who showed up. Sophia and her father were “otherwise detained” and couldn’t make it. The two men didn’t come into the house for tea, but they did look around. They even asked if they could walk over to the gelding pasture and the mare pasture and have a look at the horses—“You needn’t get them out, but Jane speaks so highly …” So they strolled over to the fence and looked at everyone. I was sorry Lester was gone—Lincoln and Jefferson looked like what they were, regular horses who would work for a living at regular jobs. Rodney said, “Is that the colt?”

And Daddy said, “Yes, that’s Abby’s colt.”

Of the mares, Colonel Hawkins liked Happy. He said she was “athletic-looking.”

“Born cow horse,” said Daddy. “Bossy as the day is long.”

Colonel Hawkins laughed.

I could see that they knew they were getting our best horse, and no one else even came close.

They looked Black George over, and Rodney bandaged his legs for the trip. They had brought their own light blanket, green with a rose embroidered on it and
ROR
in curly letters beneath that. I guessed that stood for “Something Something Rosebury.” Leather halter, leather lead line with a brass chain between the hook and the leather. Beautiful trailer, brand-new white truck. The rose and the
ROR
were painted on the trailer, too. Sure enough, Black George was going to live like a king.
I kissed him on the cheek and patted him on the neck, and Rodney loaded him into the trailer and lifted up the ramp, then he got into the passenger’s side of the truck. The colonel and Rodney were already talking to each other by the time they pulled away. They didn’t even wave good-bye.

On Monday, Gloria and Stella were a little stiff with me. When I said to Stella, “Oh, those are nice loafers,” she said, “Well, they aren’t Bass Weejuns.” Then I remembered that Alexis wore Bass Weejuns. When I asked Gloria what she did over the weekend, she said, “I can’t really remember.” But she thawed out by lunchtime and wanted to know all about the Adverbs game. I also told her about the bathroom. She said, “Their mom let them do that?”

“Yeah. Basically, they do whatever they want to.”

Gloria thought for a moment and said, “Yes, they do. I see that.” She sighed, then suggested, “Well, maybe they’ll come to a bad end.” We laughed. At first, I felt sorry about laughing at Alexis and Barbara, and then I thought, well, they would laugh at that, too.

As for Alexis and Barbara, they were friendly, but they weren’t my new best friends or anything. They still bustled down the hall in the morning rather than huddle with other kids around their lockers. They still sat at their own table for lunch and didn’t invite others to sit there, though they were perfectly nice if anyone did. In fact, one of the amazing things about the Goldman twins was that they didn’t change—they were always themselves. Now that I’d been to their house, I saw that that was the way the whole Goldman family was.
Maybe if you always did what you wanted to do, then you always were who you wanted to be.

At home, I missed Black George. There was a big hole in the gelding pasture, and it was in the shape of Black George. With Lester gone, too, there were only Jefferson and Lincoln and Jack. Daddy also thought he had a buyer for Sprinkles, and maybe one for Effie, so with all this new money, he was planning to go back to Oklahoma before the winter set in and see what he could find. He said, “Colonel Hawkins is right—there are plenty of good horses back there if you have a good eye and can spend the time looking for them.”

“Black Georges are pretty few and far between,” said Mom, but she was in a good mood, too. She said, “People know who we are now. That can’t be bad.”

“That’s the key,” said Daddy. “And Jane Slater knows who Abby is. There might be some of those horses out there who need a good rider to show what they can do.”

Mom took some of the money and we went shopping—new raincoat, with a zip-out liner, so I could use it all winter, kind of an amber color with wooden buttons; two skirts, one a blue plaid and one a plain brown tweed; two long-sleeved blouses, one light blue and one white; and a Fair Isle sweater, “green heather,” which would go with both the skirts. On the way home, she handed me a fifty-dollar bill, something I had never seen before. She said, “You put this in your sock drawer, and when you start going to horse shows again, you can buy yourself some tall boots. You don’t have to put it in your savings account. Your dad will give you some for that. You’ve done a really good job.”

My savings account was for the future.

I said, “Why not get the boots now?”

“Honey, you’ve grown three inches in the last year. No telling when that’s going to stop. You don’t want to outgrow them by the time you need them.”

I looked at the fifty-dollar bill. It had Ulysses S. Grant on the front and the Capitol Building on the back, with some Latin writing in the seal and
50
in every corner, just so you wouldn’t forget how much it was worth. It also had “Fifty Dollars” written underneath the picture of the Capitol Building. It all looked good to me, like a pair of smooth black boots that would be comfortable and easy to pull on but would go all the way up to my knees like Sophia’s boots. But I didn’t put the bill in my sock drawer. I folded it up and put it in an envelope and taped it to the back of a picture of Jack that was hanging above my desk.

By this time, it was almost Halloween, and Gloria decided to have a party—no trick-or-treating, just costumes and some games that her mom thought of, like bobbing for apples and pin the nose on the jack-o’-lantern. Mom helped me make a papier-mâché horse head, which I wore with Daddy’s black sweater, Mom’s black slacks, some papier-mâché hooves, and a tail we cut out of a piece of felt.

When we first got there, we had to enter quietly in our costumes, and the ones who were already there had to guess who was coming in. The easiest one was probably me, and the hardest one was Stella, who had tacked elastic bands to tin cans, then made the legs of her pants extra long. When she stuck her feet in the bands, it made her six inches taller than she really was, and then she wore a mask and a wig that belonged to her aunt. She made it up Gloria’s walk and in the front door
without falling down, and then she stood in the corner. We could not tell who she was for the longest time—until she finally laughed out loud, and we recognized her. After refreshments (pumpkin pie and chocolate ice cream), we went upstairs—the bedrooms had been made into a haunted house. The best one was in Gloria’s room, where you could see through a black lace curtain that there was a corpse in the bed with open eyes and green skin (this turned out to be the kid who lived next door and went to the high school). Whenever someone came into the room, the corpse moaned. We also gave out candy to the trick-or-treaters, so it was really fun.

It was on the Monday after this party that Daddy heard from Raymond Matthews. Raymond Matthews was the son of Mr. Matthews who owned Wheatsheaf Ranch—he had gotten our number from the detective agency when he discovered that he was going to be doing business in our vicinity. Although Mr. Matthews was the owner of the ranch, Raymond Matthews was in charge of the racing division of the family businesses, and it had fallen to him to visit our place and have a look at the alleged Jaipur colt that we now had in our possession. Although he was leaving for Kentucky on Wednesday, he had set aside some time to visit us on Tuesday afternoon, if that was convenient for Daddy.