Champion Horse (16 page)

I didn’t tell him anything about Barry Boy and the Carmichaels – why get his hopes up (or mine)? – but I thought about them, and I replayed Barry Boy’s lesson in my mind for the umpteenth time. I still thought it had been more fun than I had ever seen a horse have in my life, except for Happy chasing cows. I thought Blue should have some of that fun.

When I came into the house, Dad said, ‘Oh, by the way, I’ve agreed with Mr Rosebury that you will work Pie in the Sky and take him in a show in the spring. I think it’s good experience for you, and one show, for now, is not a big deal. You can ride the horse again tomorrow after you teach the girls. I have to go into town, so I’ll drive you over there and pick you up. I’d like to see the horse myself. Mr Rosebury and I can have a little chat.’

He had that tone in his voice that sounds like you have no choice because this is really good for you. It made me think of a story in the Bible about a king who sees some writing on a wall, and then he knows that something is true. I saw the writing on the wall. I was going to be taking over Sophia’s horse whether I wanted to or not. 

On Saturday, Sophia was wearing nice pants that were stuck into some rubber boots, and she had on a scarf, a sweater, and a jacket, even though it wasn’t terribly cold. She also had a brown paper bag in her hand, and I knew there was something to eat in it, since at school, she nibbled away at grapes and apple slices and various kinds of crackers. She hadn’t fainted again. She’d explained ‘pi’ to Stella in a way that Stella could understand, and ‘hypotenuse’ and ‘equilateral triangle’, and Stella thought she was brilliant. In the meantime, Stella explained the concept of eyeshadow to Sophia. Sophia seemed less convinced than Stella, especially when Stella told her that you had to apply it at least four times a day to ‘maintain the freshness of the look’.

At the stables, Dad walked right up to Mr
Rosebury
and they shook hands like they were trying to knock each other down. Mr Rosebury said, ‘Well, Mark Lovitt, you are a legend around here. I was out of town when we picked up Onyx, but I had been planning to come out to the wilderness there and see you. Sorry I didn’t! That’s a great horse you sold us, and worth every penny!’

Dad of course agreed with this, and was grinning from ear to ear. Rodney gave me a leg-up onto Pie in the Sky, and after the two fathers stared at Onyx for a while, they came over and looked at us. I listened to them as I walked behind Colonel Hawkins to the arena.

‘Nicely made,’ said Dad. ‘A little narrow, but a good hindquarters on him, nice hock, good ankle.’

‘I like the tail set,’ said Mr Rosebury. ‘And you know what they say about jumpers – nothing like a steep angle from the croup to the tail. Call that a “jumping bump”.’

‘Makes sense for the jumping effort,’ said Dad. ‘Horse wants to be able to open up.’

‘Nice long neck, too,’ said Mr Rosebury. ‘Get a better bascule that way.’

‘Never heard that word before,’ said Dad.

‘Oh, that’s the arc over the jump. But to my way of thinking, different horses have different styles, and they make too much of this bascule. I like a horse like Onyx, here, who’s a little flat over the top, but has plenty of spring.’

Mr Rosebury put his hand on Pie in the Sky’s hip as we walked along. Once again, Jane and Sophia were behind us, lagging a little, so I couldn’t hear what they were talking about. I watched Onyx’s shining black rump. His tail was waving from side to side as he walked, and when we went into the arena, he lifted it and, as Dad would have said, ‘made a deposit’. Truly, he was very relaxed.

Pie in the Sky was himself. I knew more or less what to do with him now, which was to put him to work moving this way and that, softening him up and getting him to pay attention. I wondered if he would put me to the test again. I was only to ride him once a week – Rodney and Colonel Hawkins were riding him three other times, but this was the only jumping day. Colonel Hawkins and Onyx trotted away from us, and I made a big loop and went in the other direction. In the corner I did some small figure of eights. Pie in the Sky was flat, and then he was round. His trot picked up a little spring, and he tried to canter. I think he was thinking, ‘Yes, I do feel pretty good this morning.’

Sophia and Jane went to the centre of the arena and watched us. Sophia had yet to smile, but she stared at Onyx and then at us. She looked pinched and cold.

And sad. As I trotted past her, I saw her take another cracker out of her bag.

Dad and Mr Rosebury kept talking the whole time that the colonel and I rode around them. They laughed, and Mr Rosebury slapped Dad on the back three different times. I couldn’t help staring a little bit. Dad had friends, but they were all in our church, and even then he was just a little stiff with them, in case someone broke a rule that he thought was important. People outside of the church were for doing business, and some he liked to do business with, such as Mr Jordan, who was always nice; Mr Tacker, who had bought a couple of horses from us; and Jake Morrison. But that was business. If they were not in our church, then they were not saved, and he didn’t want to get too close to them or he would have to save them, and that didn’t usually work (as with Uncle Luke and some of our other relatives). Mr Rosebury didn’t give him a chance, though. Every time I rode past, Mr Rosebury was saying what a good rider I was, or what a nice horse Onyx was, or how, in another life, he wouldn’t mind being the sort of horseman Dad was. Dad didn’t even correct him – we have one life, and one life is one chance to do right by the Lord.

The arena we went to was the one with the outside course – you jumped over the hogback at one end, and then out into a big field. The jump at the end had been a coop, but they’d changed it, and they’d changed some of the jumps in the field, too, since the last time Onyx, as Black George, and I had tried those fences and found ourselves (a surprise to me, but not to Black George) jumping the fifteen-foot ditch. Since then, they had added two rather large brush fences and a jump that looked like a table half tilted upwards. It was solid and scary-looking, but scarier to a person than a horse, since the tilt just sort of drew the horse over it. Another scary one had a ditch in front of a vertical built like a pasture fence, and another had two banks – you cantered up a slope, jumped off the bank, jumped right up onto the next bank, which was a stride away, and then galloped down that slope. Fortunately, Colonel Hawkins and Onyx took all the jumps before I did, and I could watch them. The other thing was that they were solid but not terribly high, and for Pie in the Sky that was fine. He wouldn’t have touched the top of any fence if he could help it. It was fun galloping around in the grass – cross-country, you might say. He liked being out of the arena and even had a little more energy than he usually did, but because the jumps were new to him, he paid attention to them and not to whether I was offending him by not doing everything just the way he wanted me to. I didn’t feel that we were about to have any refusals, and the two times he bucked a little bit seemed like exuberance rather than resistance. The jump that looked the scariest – off the one bank and onto the other – was pretty natural. Pie in the Sky was not going to get stuck between those two banks.

On the way back to the barn, Mr Rosebury kept talking to Dad. ‘Now, it’s fall and the show season is over, and we can do some things for fun that we wouldn’t have time to do in the spring, like play around on the outside course. These jumps are for three-day eventing. That’s the colonel’s first love, and it’s an Olympic sport, but between you and me, there isn’t a dime to be made in that sport. It’s a sport for the horseman, really; old cavalry types love it. They can show off what they know to a knowledgeable audience, but I’ve set my sights on bigger game, if you know what I mean.’

Dad kept nodding. Either Mr Rosebury was overwhelming him, or Dad was making a plan, but either way, you would have thought they were best friends now.

This is not to say that Mr Rosebury didn’t pay attention to Sophia. He patted her on the head, and two or three times he peeked into her bag and made a little sign to her to keep eating. She and Jane hardly said a word to each other. When we were finished riding and were walking to the car park, Dad and Mr Rosebury were ahead of us, talking, and I walked next to Sophia. I said, ‘I thought the cross-country course was kind of fun, and not as scary to ride as to look at.’

‘I’m never scared.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know. Just never was.’

Now was the time to ask why she wasn’t riding. We walked towards the cars, but then Dad and Mr Rosebury stopped, and Mr Rosebury started tapping Dad on the chest with his forefinger, while Dad nodded. I didn’t want to hear what they were saying, so I stopped, too. This was when I said, ‘So why not ride?’

Sophia just shrugged. But then she said, ‘The more they want me to, the less I want to.’ She cocked her head at her father, and I realised he had the same effect on me. It was like every word was a little prod of some sort, nudging you towards whatever he thought you should do. At least Dad and Mom were straightforward: ‘You will do this, and I’m not going to discuss it.’ You could do it or not, but if you didn’t do it, you knew what the consequences would be, and if you did do it, well, whatever it was was over and done with. But for Mr Rosebury, nothing was ever over, because he always had bigger plans. I thought maybe I should give up on Sophia.

Dad was in a good mood as we drove home. He hummed a couple of tunes that he liked, ‘Red River Valley’ and ‘Banks of the Ohio’. We knew these songs, and I always thought it was funny that he sang them when he was happy, because they were sad songs. He didn’t say much to me about Pie in the Sky, other than ‘That horse ever turned out?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘He might like that. He seems full of beans.’

‘I guess they think he’s too valuable for that. I mean, he gets ridden four days a week, and maybe Rodney lunges him the other three.’

‘Never could see that way of thinking, myself.’ He shook his head. ‘Horse has to have time to be a horse.’

I went out and tacked up Blue and took him through the mare pasture down to the creek. Oh My and Nobby walked along with us and Rusty went ahead – at one point, I could hear her bark three times, and then I heard some rustling. If there was rustling, then she was chasing a deer, which she did just for exercise. Blue ambled along, happy to be out, and for sure happy to have some company going along with us. It was always true that when Oh My was relaxed, then the other horses were relaxed also because she was the boss mare of the little band. When we got down to the creek, Oh My splashed around in the six inches of water that was still running; Nobby even got down and rolled, since the bottom of the creek right there was sandy and cool. Blue seemed to enjoy their company. He dipped his nose in the water and splashed once or twice before taking a small drink, then he pawed a couple of times. I could tell that he felt very comfortable. I sat deep in the saddle and stroked him over the top of his haunches. Oh My was like Leslie, wasn’t she? She told everyone what to do, but in a relaxed way. Blue had friends. Probably Pie in the Sky did not have friends – Sophia wasn’t his friend, and I wasn’t his friend, and the way he lived at the stables meant that he didn’t have a chance to make horse friends.

Sophia now sat with us at lunch every day, and Alana sat across the room, by the window, with Linda A., whom we had gone to school with, and some new friends of hers that she had met working on the school newspaper and the yearbook. Leslie had made a rule that if Sophia saw something in our lunches that looked good to her, she could eat it, and that person would get a bonus point for letting her have it.

So every day we would take our lunches out of the sacks and Sophia would look at them, and sometimes she picked something. When she did, we all laughed. But Leslie gave her a rule, too – she had to eat it. It was actually kind of fun, and I found that when I was deciding what to put in my lunch in the morning, I looked for things that Sophia might possibly choose. The one I came up with was dried apricots. Stella came up with Fig Newtons. Leslie herself came up with carrot sticks dipped in cream cheese. Lucia brought popcorn from the night before. Sophia’s eyes actually got big when she saw that, and she ate it right up. We had no idea what we would do with the bonus points, but we figured that Leslie would come up with something.

It was Leslie who told me that there was a bus that went from the high school past the Marble Ranch, stopping on the way to pick up kids at the junior high. If I wanted to go to the Marble Ranch, that was the one I would take. I decided not to wait any longer and, on Tuesday, called Mom from the office. She said it was okay.

When the kids got on at the junior high school, Daphne got on almost last and sat down in the front. But the bus driver took off pretty fast and we all had to stay seated, so I couldn’t let her know I was there. It was interesting to watch her, though. She sat next to the window, smiling and looking out at the passing scenery. She talked a little bit to the girl next to her, but it didn’t seem like they were good friends. Then, after we had been going for about five minutes, a paper wad hit the window above her head, and she turned around. Just as the bus driver looked in the mirror and shouted, ‘Hey, back there! George Kennedy, I see you!’ another paper wad flew in Daphne’s direction, and her hand went up and caught it, just like that. She gave it to the girl next to her, who leaned forward and gave it to the bus driver, who called out, ‘I’m taking this to the police, and they are going to fingerprint this!’

I don’t think anyone believed him, but the kids did quiet down. Daphne went back to looking out the window.

When we got to the stop, she got off without realising that I was behind her, but when I stepped down from the bus, she exclaimed, ‘Oh, Abby! Hi! Were you really on the bus?’

‘I was in the back.’

We started up the road. I said, ‘That was neat, the way you caught that paper wad.’

She grinned. ‘That bus is crazy. Some of those boys were talking about putting a bag over the bus driver’s head one day.’

‘They never did it, did they?’

‘I would have tripped them if I saw them coming.’

‘I bet you would have.’

The arena was empty, so we walked all the way up the hill to the barn, and I followed Daphne into the office, then into a small courtyard. It was a windy spot, and the oaks were huge – they loomed over the barns and the leaves rattled, but the view was wide and imposing, with the Marble Ranch valley just beneath us, then a deeper valley, and steep, dark green mountains beyond that. Daphne took her books into one of the cabins, and as I was looking around, Danny emerged from one of the others (there were three), and of course he was surprised to see me. It was almost four-thirty by the stables clock. I said, ‘Is that your room?’

He nodded.

‘Can I see it?’

But he ignored me, which I expected him to do. Even when he was living at home and he was twelve and I was eight, he had a sign on his door that said, ‘Do Not Entire!’ When he didn’t answer, I poked him in the ribs, and he laughed, but he still didn’t take me to see it. I said, ‘I want to watch the Carmichaels some more.’