Harvesting the Heart (50 page)

“Jean-Claude?” Josh said. “He's only been here a month. But Jesus, Donegal's her first horse, and he's a champion, and he's only seven.” Josh bent down and pulled a stalk of grass from the ground and settled it between his front teeth. He began to tell me the story of my mother and Fly By Night Farm.

She had been working as a personal secretary to Harlan Cozackis, a Kentucky millionaire who had made his fortune in corrugated cardboard. He was very involved in the racing circuit and bought a couple of horses who placed well in the Derby and the Preakness. When he got pancreatic cancer, his wife left him for his business partner. He had told Lily she ought to go too; who gave a damn if his company was in order, since the co-owner was banging his own wife? But Lily hadn't left. She stopped keeping the books and started to feed Harlan barley soup in bed; she recorded the times he'd taken his painkillers. He tried chemotherapy for a while, and Lily stayed with him the nights after the treatments, holding damp washcloths to his wrinkled chest and mopping up his vomit.

When he started to die, Lily sat for hours at his side, reading him the odds for local horse races and placing bets over the phone. She told him stories of her days as Calamity Jane in the rodeo, and that was probably what had given him the idea. When he died, he did not leave her any money but instead gave her the colt that had been born just a month before, sired by a stallion with bloodlines to Seattle Slew.

Josh said my mother had laughed long and hard over this one: she had a nearly priceless horse and not a red cent to her name. She drove to Carolina, all the way to Farleyville, until she found a stable she wanted to lease. She brought Donegal out here and for a long time he was the only one in the barn, but she paid her rent just the same. Little by little, by giving lessons to people on their own horses and farms, she saved enough money to buy Eddy, and also Tony, and then Aurora and Andy. She bought a horse named Joseph right from the track, like Aurora, and trained him for a year and then sold him for $45,000—three times her buying price. That was when she started to show Donegal, and his prize money began to pay for his blue-blood care: hundred-fifty-dollar plastic shoes, shots every three months, expensive hay with more clover than timothy. “But we still lost ten thousand dollars last year,” Josh said.

“You lost
ten thousand dollars,”
I whispered. “You don't even turn a profit? Why does she keep doing this?”

Josh smiled. In the distance, my mother spoke softly to Jean-Claude and then lifted herself into the saddle bound over his back. She held her reins steady until the horse stopped whinnying and tossing from side to side. She lifted her face to the sky and laughed into the wind. “It's her karma,” Josh said. “Why else?”

It got easier every day. I would ride for an hour in the morning after we'd turned out the other horses and mucked the stalls. I rode Tony, the gentlest horse my mother owned. Under her careful direction, I improved. My legs stopped feeling like tightly stretched bands. I could second-guess the horse, who had a habit of ducking out to the right of a jump. Even the canter, which at first had seemed so quick and uncontrollable, had settled. Now Tony would take off so neatly I could close my eyes and pretend that I was running on the voice of the wind.

“What do you want to do now?” my mother called from the center of the ring.

I had slowed Tony to a walk. “Let's jump,” I said. “I want to try a vertical.” I knew now that the fences were called gymnastics; that a straight-across bar was a vertical and an “X” was called a cross-rail. Because Tony was only about fourteen hands, he couldn't jump very high, but he could easily take a two-foot vertical if he was in the mood.

I loved the feeling of a jump. I loved the easy lead up to it, the squeeze of my thighs and calves pressuring the horse's hind end, the remarkable power with which he pushed off the ground. As Tony started to come up, I'd lift myself into the half-seat position, suspended in midair until the horse's back rose up to meet me. “Don't look down-look across the jump,” my mother had told me over and over, and I would, seeing the rich berry-twisted brush that edged the stream. It never failed to surprise me that within seconds, we actually touched down on everyday earth.

My mother set up a course of six jumps for me. I patted Tony's neck and gathered up my reins for a canter. My mother shouted corrections at me, but I could barely hear her. We flew around the ring so gracefully I wasn't sure that the horse's legs were striking the ground. Tony took the first jump long, throwing me back in the saddle. He picked up speed, and I knew that I should be sitting back to slow him, but somehow my body wasn't doing what I wanted it to. As he landed the next jump, he raced around the corner of the ring. He leaned strangely to one side, and I fell off.

When I opened my eyes, Tony was gnawing on the grass along the edge of the ring and my mother was standing above me. “It happens to everyone,” she said, reaching out her hand to help me up. “What do you think you did wrong?”

I stood and dusted off the britches I'd borrowed from her. “Besides the fact that he was running a hundred miles an hour?”

My mother smiled. “Yeah, it was a little faster than a usual canter,” she said.

I rubbed my hand over the back of my neck and readjusted the black velvet helmet. “He was off center,” I said. “I knew I was going to fall off before it happened.”

My mother pulled Tony back by the reins and held him while I mounted again. “Good girl,” she said. “That's because when you come across a diagonal, you've changed your direction. When you canter, a horse should have the inside lead, right?” I nodded; I remembered this lesson well because it had taken me forever to figure it out: when a horse cantered, or galloped, for that matter, the leg on the innermost side of the ring should be the first to fall; it kept them balanced. “When you change your direction, the horse needs to switch leads. Tony won't do it naturally—he's too dumb for that; he'll just run around off kilter, wearing himself out until he trips or throws you off. You've got to tell him, really, that you want him to try a new trick in his repertoire. You break him down to a trot and then pick up the canter again—it's called a simple change of lead.”

I shook my head. “I can't remember all this,” I said.

“Yes you can,” my mother insisted. She clucked Tony into a trot. “Do a figure eight,” she said, “and don't stop. He's not going to do what you want him to unless you guide him into it. Keep going across your diagonals and do your simple changes.”

By the time we turned down the first diagonal, I had Tony moving quietly toward the middle of the jump. I looked at his hooves, and Tony was on the same lead he'd been on before the jump, only now, because we'd changed direction, it was his outside leg. I pulled back on the reins until he broke his stride, and then I turned his head toward the woods and kicked him into a canter again. “Good,” my mother yelled, and I squeezed Tony over the next line of jumps. I did the same pattern over and over until I thought I was breathing harder than Tony, and I slowed him to a walk without my mother's command.

I leaned over Tony's neck, sighing into his coarse mane. I knew about running fast, and knowing you were off balance, and not understanding how to fix yourself. “You don't see how lucky you have it,” I said. I thought about how easy it would be to take an unfamiliar course if I had someone pushing me in the right direction; a gentle, knowing pressure that let me break down the pace until I was ready to run again.

“When do I get to ride Donegal?” I asked, as we led him to the field where my mother liked to ride him. His mane whipped from left to right as he strained against the leather lead to his halter.

“You could sit him right now,” my mother said, “but you wouldn't be riding him; he'd be riding you.” She handed me the reins while she adjusted the chin strap of her riding helmet. “He's a phenomenal horse, he'll take any jump you put in front of him and automatically change his leads, but he'd just be making you look good. If you're learning to ride, you should do it on someone like Tony, a workhorse with an attitude.”

I saw my mother swing herself into the saddle and take off at a trot; then I sat down on the grass and watched her ride. I opened the pad I'd brought and took out a stick of charcoal. I tried to draw the spirit that seemed to run straight from my mother's spine through the flanks and powerful hind legs of Donegal. She didn't even have to touch the horse; it seemed that she communicated her changes and transitions by willing them into Donegal's mind.

I drew the crimped jet mane and the arch of the horse's neck, the steam rising from his sides and the rhythm of his labored breathing. I sketched the rippled muscles of Donegal's legs, from the line of the blue shin and ankle boots to the raw force that throbbed in check beneath the sheen of his haunches. My mother leaned low over his neck, whispering words I could not hear. Her shirt flew out behind her, and she moved faster than light.

When I drew her, she seemed to come right out of the horse, and it was impossible really to tell where he ended and she began. Her thighs were wrapped tight around Donegal's flanks, and his legs seemed to move across the page. I drew them over and over on the same piece of paper. I was working so furiously that I never noticed my mother getting off Donegal, tying him up to the fence, and coming to sit beside me.

She peered over my shoulder and stared at her image. I had drawn her repeatedly, but the final effect was that of motion: her head and Donegal's were bent low at several different angles and positions, all rooted to the same flying body. It seemed mythical and sensual. It was as if my mother and Donegal had started off several times but couldn't decide where they wanted to go.

“You're amazing,” my mother said, resting her hand on my shoulder.

I shrugged. “I'm okay,” I said. “I could be better.”

My mother touched her fingertips to the edge of the paper. “Can I have it?” she asked, and before I handed it over I peered into the hollows and shadows of the picture, trying to see what else I might have revealed. But this time, in spite of all the secrets that lay between us, there was absolutely nothing.

“Sure,” I said. “Consider it yours.”

At the end of August I went with my mother to an AHSA “A” list horse show in Culpeper, Virginia. We packed Donegal into the trailer and drove for six hours. I helped my mother lead him into the makeshift stalls under the blue-and-white tent. That night, we paid to practice on the four-foot jumps, which Donegal took easily after being cooped up for so long. My mother tacked him down and gave him a warm bath. “We'll see you tomorrow, Don,” she said, “and I'm planning on going home with a champion.”

The next day I watched, wide-eyed, as judging went on in three rings at once. Men and women competed together, one of the few sports where they were equal. My mother's class was Four Foot Working Hunter, the highest show class. She seemed to know everyone there. “I'm going to change,” she said, and when she returned, she was wearing tan britches, tall polished boots, a high-necked white blouse, and a blue wool blazer. She had jammed her hair into fifteen little barrettes all around her head, and she asked me to hold a mirror while she stuffed her helmet on over them. “Points off,” she told me, “if any hair is sticking out.”