Centaur Rising (15 page)

*   *   *

Well, we all had ideas and not just about TV, but Dr. Herks had the best one. He came over that evening for dinner and told us.

“Kai is growing so fast. He needs to be able to run, not just stay cooped up in his stall or in the corridor. Agora's getting a little crabby, too. She tried to kick me this morning.”

I gasped. That was not like Agora at all.

“Not a
real
kick,” Dr. Herks was quick to say, “but a warning nevertheless.”

“Why a fence?” Robbie asked. “Why not just let him run in the pasture?”

“Don't be a Silly Billy,” Martha said. “Prying eyes. Secrets discovered. Crowds of people. Old man Suss selling tickets on his side of the fence.”

“Martha's right. With a fenced-in run, Kai will be able to race to his heart's content outdoors,” Dr. Herks told Robbie, “and yet be safe from prying eyes, as long as there aren't any photographers and sightseers in helicopters.”

“
Helicopters?
” I checked his face to see if he was kidding.

*   *   *

The next day, Friday, he showed up with a pickup truck full of wooden fencing, a posthole digger, a sledgehammer, and a toolbox.

“Taking a break from my practice” is how he put it. “For the first time in a year, I'm letting Dr. Small cover the office the entire weekend.” He smiled. “That's how much I like your family, Ari.”

I smiled back, afraid to read too much into what he'd said.

“I told her not to call me, not even if it's an emergency. And I reminded her she has always been great in emergencies. Since she's considering retirement, she's put more and more on my shoulders. I think she was shocked that I needed time off.”

“Gerry, this”—Mom waved at the full pickup truck—“is hardly time off.”

“It is to me,” he said.

Mom smiled tentatively. “Thanks.”

“Arlene's been a vet since before I was a teen,” Dr. Herks explained. “I used to work for her cleaning out the pens. She's the one who encouraged me to go to veterinary school after my Vietnam service, and then let me buy into her practice. But she still needs to hear that she's a good vet as she worries that at her age she's lost too much of her speed and skill.”

“Everyone does,” Mom said. “I'm not as fast up on a horse these days…” She wasn't grinning, except with her eyes. I hoped Dr. Herks could see that.

*   *   *

We all helped with the fence—Mom and Martha and me, of course, as well as Mrs. Angotti, the Propers, and Dr. Harries, who had come to work their horses and stayed to build the fence, not just the unloading of materials on Friday but the whole weekend long.

Dr. Harries and Mom and Mr. Proper hauled all the biggest pieces of fence to the places where Dr. Herks had dug forty postholes, twenty on each side, ten feet apart. I got to help Martha and Dr. Harries with the measurements.

“You women are too fast for me,” Dr. Herks said, and gave me a wink.

The fence was eight feet high, higher than Kai would be when fully grown. It was attached to the end of the back barn but wound well into the pasture, staying far enough away from the Suss farm's fence that it couldn't be overlooked. It looped back on itself and—to make it a bit more interesting—cut off a corner of the pond so Kai would have a place to drink, too.

“Why not a jump or two?” Mrs. Angotti suggested when we were almost done.

“Too dangerous,” Mom said.

Martha added, “You can't put a boy down if his leg breaks.”

“Or get him into a wheelchair,” Dr. Harries pointed out.

“Or have him use crutches,” Mrs. Proper said.

The thought of all that was both funny and terrifying. The idea of any jumps was quickly dismissed.

Joey was more trouble than help until we let him sit in Agora's stall and play Monopoly with Robbie and Kai and the Proper kids. At this point, Kai could beat them all but had somehow figured out how to cheat in order to let Joey win occasionally.

The only one who stayed far away from the action was Angela. She elected to work in the kitchen making pitchers of lemonade and setting out the cookies for our frequent breaks. I think she was still embarrassed to be around us because of spilling the secret.

Either way, I was secretly relieved.

Even with all the help, getting that long fence up was hard work, and it took two days. We didn't finish until Sunday at dinnertime.

*   *   *

That evening, we let Kai try out his new toy. He could go right from the barn into the fenced-in run without being seen by onlookers. The run was wide enough for him to turn around in, but not much more. It followed the curve of the wire fence, but only on the side where we bordered the National Forest land. We didn't want people over on the Suss property taking pictures from ladders.

He stepped into the run in a shy way. Unlike little boys, horses aren't really explorers. They prefer the known to the unknown. But soon enough, his boy brain took over and then Kai began trotting up and down, arms in the air and shouting, “I'm trotting fast, Ari.” And when he broke into a gallop, he added, “I'm running
very
fast!”

As he raced along, tail flaring out behind, he called out, “The Black Stallion would be proud!”

You could always tell what he and Robbie were reading together!

“Not just fast, Kai—you're almost flying!” Then I called out the names of whatever gaits he was doing.

He already knew
walk,
trot
,
gallop
, but we added
canter
,
pace
,
amble
,
halt
,
back up
,
turn
and he got them all the first time. The only one that confused him was the fox-trot because it went diagonally. We all laughed ourselves silly as he tried to master it.

Robbie made up a game song for him, trying to trick him.

Here comes Kai a-walking, walking,

Here comes Kai a-trot.

Here comes Kai ambling—

A canter, it is not!

“He's a pony Einstein,” Mrs. Proper declared, patting his head each time he made the circuit.

Robbie got pouty at that. “Not a pony, not a scientist.”

Mrs. Proper smiled. “You're right, Robbie. I won't make that mistake again.”

But Kai wasn't hurt by what she said. In fact, he wanted to know what an Einstein was, and later we found him two children's books at the library on the subject.

Dr. Herks lent him two other books, one called
Essentials of Human Anatomy
and one about horse anatomy. They were both way over his head, but he loved the pictures.

“He just gulps it all down,” Dr. Herks said. “Never saw anything like it.”

“He'll be a teen before we know it,” Martha said, adding sourly, “Not sure I'm ready for that!”

*   *   *

It had become clear very early on that Kai had to be a vegetarian. He liked the taste of just about anything, but it turned out he had only one stomach after all. Dr. Herks had determined that by a variety of tests. One stomach, and it was in the horse part of his body.

There'd been a close call midweek, when Joey—feeling generous after having beaten Kai at Monopoly—had shared his chocolate cupcake with Kai, who wolfed it down. There was no way either of them could have known that chocolate can be very dangerous to a young horse's digestion.

Martha said, “Thank the stars that Dr. Herks was around and noticed a chocolate smear on Kai's mouth.”

Thank the stars indeed!
He got Kai to throw up the chocolate and explained what a close call we'd had. It convinced us all that Kai had to remain on a strict horse diet, and he had to learn what was safe for him to eat and why.

What Kai liked best (besides chocolate, which he now knew he couldn't have) were carrots and apples. He had a terrible sweet tooth, and would have eaten as many sugar cubes as he could get.

Dr. Herks told him sternly, “Not too often, Kai, because horses simply can't tolerate a lot of it.”

“But Boy Kai likes sugar.”

“It's horse Kai's tummy we have to worry about,” Martha said.

That left grass and grains, which horses need because of ulcers and other stomach problems. So we had to give Kai oat cereals and breads made with rough oats, alfalfa, barley. From early on, Mom did one large baking on Wednesdays and smaller ones throughout the week. Now Angela helped whenever she was visiting.

It turned out that if we put enough molasses on barley mash, Kai would eat it like a dessert. For a treat he had oatcakes every Thursday with a dollop of apple butter. He called it
Yum-day
.

I got the job each evening to cook down a mixture of grasses, apple slices, unpeeled carrots sweetened with a little sugar water, and crushed vitamin pills Dr. Herks brought us to help strengthen Kai's bones. After the mixture cooled, I used a beater to turn it into a kind of puree and then poured it through a funnel into glass bottles, which we kept in a small refrigerator in his stall with a line snaking out to an outlet in the hall. It took him only a minute to learn how to open the refrigerator door. He could drink about a half dozen bottles of juice during the day. But all that food and the veggie-fruit drinks meant that his growth-spurt geyser became a constant waterfall. And as a consequence, he weaned himself.

Now that he was no longer nursing, Agora was put into another stall. Just as well since his boy stuff—a table for his games, a small bookcase, the fridge—was filling up all the spaces. Though often Kai asked for her to come back at night so he could sleep cuddled up next to her.

Luckily for me, he quickly learned to keep his stall clean. What with my other chores, I needed all the help I could get.

 

19

Questions, Answers

T
HE REST OF THE SIXTH WEEK FLEW BY
, and Sunday almost all of the reporters, plus two new ones, came back. The only one who didn't was the guy from the
Boston Globe
, who sent us a message that he would use whatever the wire services gave him because he was on a bigger story: President Johnson had recently announced a huge new number of soldiers were being sent to Vietnam, and the
Globe
reporter was preparing to be sent overseas.

Mom invited the reporters into the barn office and gave them coffee and zucchini muffins. While they ate, she outlined what would happen next. It had taken us a couple of hours to figure it out, and she'd typed up the schedule. Dr. Herks had one of those new copying machines called a Xerox at his office, a present from a happy horse owner whose prize racehorse he'd saved. With it, he'd made a dozen copies, which he handed out. They were much easier to read than the purple mimeo things we had at school.

And then the questions came thick and fast.

“Is he real?” asked the first reporter, a redhead with an even redder mustache that covered the sides of his mouth like parentheses.

Mom's smile was tight. “Of course he's real. As real as you or me.”

“I mean, a real
centaur
,” the reporter persisted.

“
Pony boy
would be more accurate,” Dr. Herks told him. “This isn't ancient Greece, after all.”

A second reporter, slight and balding, with a nose like a leprechaun's, leaned forward and asked eagerly, “When can we see him?”

“Shortly,” Mom said. “Kai should have finished his breakfast by now.”

“Kai?” asked a guy with long stork legs and a nose like a beak.

Mom nodded at me to answer this one.

“That's his name. Short for Chiron, after the good centaur in the Greek myths, the one who taught Jason and other Greek princes.”

A hand shot up. The man had a short, pointed beard. “Can you spell Chiron?”

I was surprised that a reporter had to ask such a thing, but I spelled
Chiron
slowly, the way you do in a spelling bee. They all scribbled in their notebooks.

Martha added, “And
her
name is Arianne Martins, daughter of the house and three-time winner of the Swift River Elementary School spelling bee.”

Surprised, I blushed. I hadn't known she knew. Or cared.

More scribblings.

Mom then took over again. “We have ladders at five different locations along the fence so you can watch Kai run. Please don't call or shout to him. He's still very young and can startle easily. And no pictures outside, as he's already had a fright once. When he's back in the barn, in more comfortable and controlled surroundings, you will be able to speak to him, and that's where you can take your pictures.”

There was a squabble of hands and voices.

The stork man asked, “He talks?”

And the bearded man added, “In English?”

Mom nodded.

“What else?” I muttered. “He was born here. Of course he speaks English!”

Mom glared at me.

“What does he think of the news about the soldiers going to Vietnam?” asked the redhead.

Martha huffed through her nose. “Don't be an idiot. He's a little boy. He loves fairy tales and board games. He's a whiz at Monopoly, and he recently stopped playing peekaboo. He doesn't watch the news. Or read the trash you write.”

She stalked off, her shoulders hunched as if she thought they were about to throw paper bombs at her.

After she left, Dr. Herks gave them a quick rundown on Kai's anatomy, his diet, and the fact that he had two hearts.

That's when the balding guy said, “So what's this about…” He looked down at his notebook. “
Puericentaurcephalitis
? Is it catching? Is it fatal? Can humans—”

“Where did you hear that?” Dr. Herks almost barked at the man.

“Not at liberty to give you my sources.”