Champion Horse (17 page)

‘I guess Daphne is going to ride, and I suppose you can watch. But how are you going to get home?’

I knew Danny would take me. But I didn’t say anything. Daphne came out in her riding clothes, with two apples in her hands. She said, ‘You want one of these? They’re Sierra Beauties. Pop knows a guy who sends them to us.’

I took the apple, and tasted it. It was really good. Danny said, ‘Hey! Aren’t you going to even give me a bite?’

I gave him a bite. Then she said, ‘I guess they’re down there? The bus was a little slow today.’

Danny said, ‘Well, someone brought a horse from up in Watsonville. I shod him, too. But only in front.’

‘Oh,’ said Daphne. ‘That’s Curly. He’s fun. Pop coaches him once a month. Mr Pinckney brings him to us, wherever we are.’

I said, ‘How much does your dad charge?’

‘Well,’ said Daphne, ‘he charges a half peck of onions, some pork chops, a couple of pork roasts, some garlic, and some lettuce. Mr Pinckney has a farm up there. He brings stuff.’

I said, ‘Would he take money?’

Danny and Daphne both laughed.

As we came down, we could see someone letting Curly into the arena. He trotted around a little bit, then whinnied. Curly was little and almost black, only about the size of Morning Glory, but muscular and strong-looking. Ralph was standing with the owner, talking. Daphne called out, ‘Hey, Pop!’

He gave her a big smile, and the owner shouted, ‘Hey, Daphne, how are ya, darlin’?’

Daphne began to run, and Danny and I sped up.

We followed the three of them and the horse to the training paddock. I guess Daphne had been riding and training Curly for a while – he was a mature horse and fit. He walked along on a loose rein with his tail swinging back and forth, but he had his eye out. He looked alert and self-confident. When they got to the pen, I saw that the jumps were pretty high, and there were a lot of poles stacked in the centre of the paddock. Daphne spent about ten minutes warming the little horse up, mostly on a loose rein, but she did ask him, bit by bit, to lift his head and lengthen his stride. When they were finally going, he looked like a picture in a book, stepping lively, his neck arched and his ears pricked. Just about then, Andy showed up.

When Daphne started the jumping part, she picked up a real gallop, not a canter. The difference was not in the horse’s level of excitement, or even the quickness of his strides, but in his stride length. He went at a good pace around the arena, changing directions, changing leads, slowing down, speeding up. He handled his body as well as I had ever seen a horse do, and Daphne stuck right with him. She galloped down over the fences that Ralph and the owner had built for her, and she did it on her own – Ralph didn’t call out and tell her what to jump. The effect of this was to make the whole thing seem more fun. She was doing what she felt like (and the horse felt like) without being ordered about.

She must have taken fourteen or sixteen jumps, first at about three-foot-three and then about three-foot-six. Ralph and Andy just went around, staying out of her way, and raised the jumps. Then she came to the trot and let the horse stretch his head and neck down and move out. The horse trotting was like a baseball player or some other kind of athlete stretching himself a little after making an effort. Then they walked. While they were taking a break, Ralph and Andy and the owner started moving the poles. Danny and I went in to help them when we saw what they were doing.

They were building a long chute that ran around half of the pen, and inside the chute, at intervals, were jumps, just poles, but high – three-foot-nine and four foot. It took us about ten minutes to complete the whole thing, and Daphne spent some of that time trotting and turning; she was always moving. When we were finished with the chute, we backed away, and Ralph went over to Curly, who was standing near the front of the chute, and removed his bridle. Curly picked up his trot and then his gallop and galloped down through the chute, jumping the jumps, and Daphne spread her arms out like wings, the way I often had Barbie Goldman and the girls do at the walk. And she jumped the jumps in perfect rhythm. Curly did not have to be asked twice – he kept going around the pen after he was out of the chute, and went right down through it and over the jumps again. I was impressed, and so was Danny – he was staring with his mouth a little open and his eyebrows raised. I whispered, ‘Did you ever see this before?’ and he shook his head. I guess Curly was the first trained jumper he had seen the Carmichaels work with; other than him, it was all green horses.

They raised the jumps yet again, and Daphne and the horse did it once more. This time, Daphne had one hand on her chest and one over her head. She was like a circus rider.

It was pretty clear that Curly had his own style. He did not arc over the fence quite as nicely as Barry Boy – he popped over it and kicked his back legs. If he took the wrong lead, Daphne did not force him to change back, but waited until he realised that things were easier if he was on the proper lead. In fact, it looked like Curly was so sure of what he was doing that Daphne was more or less along for the ride. Andy came over to us, and I said, ‘How high can that horse jump?’

‘Well, he’s done a five-foot course, but only a couple of times.’

‘Who rode him?’

‘I did.’

Danny said, ‘Where did Mr Pinckney get him?’

‘You want to know?’

We nodded.

‘Got him from a pony-ride place. These little kids would get on him, and then they would get buckled in, and the horses would trot around a kind of grid. Mr Pinckney didn’t really know why he bought him – he’s got a ranch but no horses, only trees and vegetables and fruits. But he had a feeling, and so he brought him home. One day, when Curly was feeling frisky, he jumped out of his pen and trotted down the road to make friends, and the place he went, those people knew us, so they suggested Mr Pinckney give dad a call.’

‘Should have named him Jack in the Box,’ said Danny.

‘He does show a couple of times every year, but he’s mostly a pet. Mr Pinckney built him a stall off the back of their house, and he’s allowed to put his head in the window and have treats.’

I said, ‘I wish we could do that. Dad doesn’t even allow the dog in the house.’

Andy walked away, and Daphne took Curly out for a walk around the big arena. We started taking down the chute, and I said to Danny, ‘I want Blue to do this.’

‘That would be fun.’

‘No, I mean it. I want to bring Blue over and have some lessons. I’ll pay. That guy Peter Finneran charged sixty dollars. I’ll pay that.’

‘Do you have that?’

‘In—’

‘Will Dad let you spend that?’

I shrugged. It was one of those let-him-try-and-stop-me shrugs.

Then Danny said, ‘Well, but they might be leaving. I think I heard them say—’

I walked right over to Ralph Carmichael, and I said, ‘Mr Carmichael, I want some lessons with you more than anything in the world. I will pay you sixty dollars, and do it anytime you like. I have a wonderful sweet horse – he’s a Thoroughbred and he has a great canter, and this is exactly what he needs.’

Ralph looked a little startled, and actually stroked and curled the right side of his moustache. Then he said, ‘Well, when do you have in mind?’

‘Danny says you might be leaving?’

‘We’ve got some plans to get down to Los Angeles in a bit.’ He looked at me for a long moment, but it wasn’t the way most grown-ups look at you, as if you had better do something or else. He had brown eyes under the white eyebrows. After a moment, he said, ‘Oh, sorry. I was just thinking.’ He shook his head. Then he said what grown-ups always say: ‘We’ll see.’

I said, ‘I have sixty dollars. Danny can bring Blue over here and take him home. You can decide how many lessons sixty dollars is worth.’

Mr Carmichael smiled and said again, ‘We’ll see.’

Danny did take me home. He grumbled about it, but it turned out he wanted to talk to Dad about taking Happy to a roundup, and then there was fried chicken for supper, and so why not?

The thing with grown-ups is that you have to get them to think that something you want is their idea. And anyway, I was still excited about what we had seen, so as soon as everyone was sitting at the table, I said, ‘A guy brought his horse down from Watsonville for Ralph Carmichael to train, and he was about the size of Morning Glory and he jumped four feet.’ I glanced at Danny, then said, ‘He’s just a pet, but Andy says he’s jumped him over five-foot courses a couple of times.’

I allowed this to sink in, and then Danny said, ‘
Ralph
’s idea is that horses are a lot better jumpers than we think they are. We just don’t train them to enjoy it.’

Mom said, ‘Five feet! I don’t think—’

I said, ‘Daphne did the highest jumps without even a bridle.’

Mom said, ‘Did it break?’

‘No.’ Danny lifted his eyebrows. ‘Ralph removed it. I’ve seen them do that once before.’

Dad said, ‘Horses can do lots of things without bridles. My mare used to cut cattle without a bridle.’ I had forgotten this.

Danny said, ‘Ralph likes them to be as free as they can be. When he—’ He glanced at me. ‘Well, you’ll see.’

‘See what?’ said Mom.

‘You’ll see how he does it when Abby takes Blue over there and has a lesson or two.’

‘Blue is certainly not ready for—’

I said, ‘No, but most of the horses they train over there are beginners. Three- and four-year-olds off the track. They do little things. But they like it.’

‘That clinic you already went to was expensive,’ said Dad, ‘and I’m not sure it was good value for the—’

‘I have money.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘I want to invest in my horse. If he’s going to be sold eventually, then he has to be as good as possible.’

Dad stared at me.

‘What we’re doing isn’t working,’ I went on. After a pause, I added, ‘It’s my money.’

Danny waited for a long silent moment, then said, ‘You should come and watch. It’s about as much fun as you’ve ever seen a horse having.’

And Dad said, ‘Okay.’

That was the first step. 

After Danny left, I did what I had to do – that meant that I went up to my room and turned on Simon and Garfunkel. That also meant that I left Mom and Dad to talk about my lessons with Ralph Carmichael on their own, no nagging from me. So, I employed some magic charms: I worked out all twenty geometry problems and both of the extra-credit ones. I wrote my one-page paper on the myth of Sisyphus, which was about a guy who pushes a rock up a hill every day, only to have it roll back down every night. I read the first two chapters of
David Copperfield,
which I had not been looking forward to ever since we read another book by Charles Dickens,
Great Expectations. David Copperfield
looked like more of the same, only longer, and we would be reading it for four weeks. I also studied for my test on the
differences
between magma, pumice, basalt, lava, and tephra. I memorised where the volcanoes were: the Pinnacles, thirty miles away, which hadn’t erupted in twenty-five million years, and Mount Shasta, which erupted in 1786.The teacher said that we would get to earthquakes next week, which I was not looking forward to. In French, we had finished the book about the red balloon and were now memorising irregular verbs:
je dors, tu dors, il dort, nous dormons, vous dormez, ils dorment. Je couvre, tu couvres, il couvre,
and so forth. I yawned.
Hello darkness my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again.
This line made no sense to me, but what with the
dormir
and the
couvrir
and a long day, I went to sleep with the lights on and the music playing.

Dad was up and sitting at the table when I came in from giving the horses their morning hay. He was so excited that he and his chair were practically hopping around the floor as he poured sugar into his coffee cup, and as soon as I sat down he said, ‘Guess what?’

‘What?’

‘Ralph Carmichael has agreed to give you a lesson – really two lessons, or maybe three, but two anyway—’

I threw my arms around his neck. I could not believe that all the charms had worked so quickly and so well.

‘And you don’t have to pay, because we’ll do the lessons on Pie in the Sky and Mr Ro—’

I sat down again and closed my mouth, which had dropped open. ‘What?’

‘I told him last night about what you said about that little horse jumping five feet, and I could hardly—’

‘I wasn’t talking about Pie in the Sky.’

‘Jane will certainly want to come watch, and may bring some other horses and riders, depending on how it goes. I can’t help thinking that the Lord is at work here, giving us this opportunity. Ralph is happy to do—’

Well, I didn’t scream. But I did growl. Dad looked startled for a moment, then said, ‘I know your first idea was to take Blue.’

I said, ‘That was my only idea.’

‘Blue doesn’t have the poten—’

‘I don’t care.’

‘Of course you care. It’s essential to invest where it will make the most—’

I got up and walked out of the kitchen and up to my room, where I changed my clothes. This time I was ten minutes early for the school bus.

Sophia didn’t say a thing about this in ancient history, even though she sat next to me and told me how the night before, at supper, her dad’s Gordon setter went into the kitchen while they were eating in the dining room, put his paws on the counter, and stole what was left of the chicken, but then he tried to get it through the dining room to his bed in her dad’s study by turning his head as he passed the table so they wouldn’t see that he had it. When she told me this, we laughed out loud in spite of the death of Socrates, and Miss Cumberland gave us a very dirty look. I decided to remember this to tell to Barbie in the letter I intended to write. But Sophia didn’t seem to know then, or at lunch, about the Carmichaels.

It is very annoying the way that grown-ups are always so sure that they know best, and whatever you say you really want to do or have to do, they take as a suggestion. And then, if you are not grateful at how your plan sort of got lost in theirs, they get mad. All day long at school, I knew perfectly well that Dad, Mr Rosebury, Jane, Colonel Hawkins, and Mr Carmichael were concocting some clinic that would suit them but that would not be at all like Barry Boy and Blue and Curly cantering and playing in the paddock at the Marble Ranch towards twilight, with the hills cool and peaceful all around us, and the grass and the trees dark and mysterious. Not at all like that.

When I got home, I went straight upstairs, put on my riding clothes, and headed to the barn. I heard Mom call my name from the kitchen, but I pretended that I didn’t. Blue was standing over the water trough with Lincoln, and they were staring at something. When I looked, I saw a dead squirrel lying on the bottom. Sometimes the squirrels perch on the edge to try to get a drink but fall in and drown. If they do, even though it’s gross, you have to dump out the water trough and scrub it, and of course you have to do something with the squirrel. This one wasn’t too swollen, so it hadn’t been in there very long. I picked it up with the shovel and carried it over to the manure pile and pushed it way under, then covered it with manure and straw. It’s disgusting, but it’s the healthiest way to get rid of them and the best way to make sure that Rusty wouldn’t decide that the squirrel was her business. Even so, that meant another hour before I could get Blue out of the pasture and start with him, and it made me impatient somehow – I kept looking at Nobby and thinking I had to ride her, too, and maybe Morning Glory. My time was being wasted. It was getting late, and then I couldn’t find Blue’s bridle, and had to look for it.

How mad I was felt like waves, hot boiling waves, just rolling out of me over everything, even the things I wasn’t mad at, like the sunshine spreading through the mare pasture, and the mares themselves, and Mom, of course, and Rusty, who was now sitting quietly on the back porch while Mom lifted each of her feet, wiped them off, and then clipped her toenails. I could have named you twenty-five things I was mad about, like Peter Finneran sneering at Blue and saying, ‘One down, four to go’ when he’d chased Sophia out of the arena, so mean. I was mad about how the adults didn’t seem to care how he talked to us, and how Peter Finneran himself probably thought he was a wonderful person. I was mad about Barbie and Alexis going away to school, and our school not being good enough for them. I was mad about Sophia never acting like a regular person. I was mad about Danny being sad about Leah going to college, and I was mad about Danny getting drafted and probably, possibly, maybe going off to war. I was mad about having to read
David Copperfield
when no one, no one, had said that they liked
Great Expectations
. And I was mad that I was mad about so many stupid things. But of course, I was mostly mad that Dad and Mr Rosebury were doing my idea their way, and Blue was being lost in the shuffle. And I was mad that they thought my idea wasn’t really my business, now that they’d taken it over.

I sat down on the tack trunk, and because I knew I couldn’t scream, I made a whole bunch of faces in a row, some of them silent screaming, some of them scowling, some of them sticking out my tongue, and some of them baring my teeth. If I had had horse ears, I would have pinned them. By the time Mom came into the barn, I was just sitting there.

She was humming a little tune, not anything I knew, maybe not even a real song, just some notes. Rusty was tagging along behind her and sniffing this and that. Rusty’s interest in every detail of our place was never-ending. After Mom nested the bucket she was carrying into two others, she got the rake and started raking up bits of hay. When she was done she came over and kissed me on the forehead, then turned and walked out. I was really glad she didn’t say anything.

You are never supposed to ride your horse in a temper, even if you think you have controlled your temper, so I took the halter and got Blue, but after I put him in the cross-ties, all I did was brush him in long strokes, especially with the soft brush, top to toe and front to back. I took time with his belly, making sure I got it clean, but also making sure not to bother him. Horses’ bellies are sensitive. I felt exhausted. I closed my eyes.

When I opened them again the first thing I saw was Dad’s truck coming over the hill that was about half a mile from our gate. It was the one spot on the road that you could see from the barn. I was no longer tired. I got my saddle and Blue’s bridle. I did not want to see Dad. I was too mad at him. I put on Blue’s saddle, girthed him up, put on the bridle, and got on. I was past the paddocks before Dad was through the gate. I got around the bend in the trail, and then I slowed down. The question was where to go. I wanted a long ride.

So I went through a little gate between our place and the Jordan Ranch. We almost never used this gate – I had to dismount and open it, because the latch and the hinges were rusted – but once in a while we did ride through that part of the ranch. Mr Jordan had said that we could, but Dad didn’t like us to do it too often. The most neighbourly thing to do was go there a few times a year, to show that we accepted his hospitality, but no more than that, so as not to take advantage.

Was I still mad? Yes, but not generally, not at Blue or Mom. I was just mad at Dad and Mr Rosebury. But I was really mad at them. I got back on Blue and we turned right, along one of the ranch roads. Blue flicked his ears and turned his head. I looked back. There was Rusty, sliding under the fence and trotting after us, her tail waving in the air. Rusty loved a chance to explore.

This was a nice open trail that went diagonally up a big hill. It levelled out, and then there was an undulating stretch that was good for a bit of a canter. There were a few oaks here and there, but mostly the hillside was dry, golden grass. The cattle that had been here in the spring had been moved to give the pasture a rest, so it was very quiet. Blue picked up a lively trot and then a perfect rocking canter. I had him on a light rein. He was calm but alert, his ears moving and his head turning this way and that. I understood that he really was a Thoroughbred – knowing what you are doing at the gallop (and now we were galloping) was what a Thoroughbred was born to do. I felt it in my body that his body was completely relaxed. We galloped and galloped, and we lost sight of Rusty, but if anyone could take care of herself, it was Rusty.

There were two forks in the road, and both times I galloped down the wider, flatter fork, not so much paying attention to where I was going, only to which road had the smoother surface. The air was fresh and blew in my face. My hair sort of fluttered around under my hard hat, and Blue’s mane fluttered, too. I could see his forelock between his ears, wafting up and down. We were going fast, maybe, but it just felt smooth and endless. We went around a couple more hills, and over another one, too, and then Blue finally slowed down, not as if he was tired, but more as if he was no longer bubbly. When we came down to the walk, he walked along quite happily, still looking, still moving his ears. I sighed and realised that I had been smiling. I was panting a little and laughing, too. I wasn’t angry any more, not at Dad, not even at Mr Rosebury, who was way more annoying than Dad. Then I realised that I didn’t know where I was. And that it was getting dark.

At first, neither of these last two things bothered me, because I was so relieved at the first one. The thing is, sometimes when you are feeling really good, it takes you a while to put two and two together and come up with something as simple as four. In this case, four was that I was in trouble. How big was the Jordan Ranch? Was it five thousand acres or ten thousand acres? Whatever it was, it was so big that whenever anyone said the number, I sort of blanked out, since I couldn’t imagine that many acres.

I looked around in the deepening twilight. There was lighter sky off over one set of hills. That would be west. And the entrance to the Jordan Ranch was east of our place, but the ranch itself curved around our place, and was sometimes to the north of it and sometimes, if you got far enough, to the west of it. So where I had to go depended on where I was, and I had no idea where I was. I decided that the only solution was to retrace my steps, so I turned around and went back along the road I was on. Obviously, since I’d only taken two forks, when I came to those forks, I would keep going more or less straight, and end up back on the road that went through the gate.

Except what if there were forks in the road that I hadn’t noticed because we were galloping? There were all sorts of what-ifs, in fact. What if no moon? I couldn’t remember if there had been a moon lately, or when it had risen if there was one. Also, what if a bear, a mountain lion, a bobcat, a rattlesnake, or coyotes? Well, there weren’t any bears that I had heard of. I focused on that and did not let myself think of the worst thing, which was the rattlesnake. I had seen a rattlesnake once, and Danny had seen a rattlesnake once. There was a story Danny told us about Jake Morrison, who had been riding up a trail along a cliff at his place, and a rattlesnake slithered off the cliff, over his horse’s neck in front of the horn of the saddle, and down to the ground. Jake was so surprised he didn’t even get scared until after the snake was gone. I said, ‘Blue, watch out for snakes.’

Just then, there was a sudden
hoooooo,
and an owl flew over me. It was that dark.

But the path was light. The sky was darker than the ground, and Blue seemed to be walking along without any problem. Horses see fine in the dark, actually. He came to what I thought was the second fork we had taken and I looked around. We had gone to the right, so now we were heading a little more to the west. I looked behind us. I could just see the curve of the trail. If I had gone northwest and now I was going east and south, that made sense. We walked along. The crickets started. Then there were some coyote howls, first fairly far away, and then fairly close, off to my right, between me and our place. I shivered, whether from fear or from cold I didn’t know. Blue didn’t seem to care about the coyote howls – he flicked his ears but didn’t even look. Probably he heard coyotes howling every night. We kept going. I sort of remembered that the first fork I had taken had been to the left. But the road gave me no clues. The coyotes howled again, and this time I saw them, two of them, maybe a hundred yards away, silhouetted against the pale field, their noses pointed upward, and then another howl pierced the darkness. Blue threw his head back, pricked his ears, and snorted. All of a sudden, I was afraid.