Mending Horses (23 page)

“Aye,” Daniel said, slapping Billy's hand as she tried to swipe the last bit of piecrust from his plate. “The voice of an angel, and the temperament of the devil himself.”

Daniel rested his forearms on the top rail of the fence and stared at the ponies. He thought about the feel of the splintery wood against his skin, the morning sun on his neck, the smell of dung in the yard. He thought about everything except how to train the ponies, because when he did, his mouth went dry, his stomach tightened like a fist, and all he could think of was how impossible it was to take those ruined beasts and have them dancing in a week's time.

“Well, Dan'l?” Mr. Stocking said.

“I don't hardly know where to begin, sir. I'm no horse trainer.”

“I'll set you right if you need it, but I got to see what's in you first.”

“What's in me,” Daniel repeated softly. When he looked inside himself, he saw naught but doubt and fear and an almost-belief that everything he'd ever been told was true: that he was a stupid, clumsy oaf who'd never amount to naught. “What's in me?”

“That's what I aim to find out.” Mr. Stocking cocked his head so the light reflected off his spectacles. Daniel was sure the little man did that on purpose, so that the thick glasses became more like a mirror than a window, so's a body couldn't guess what he might be thinking.

“I know naught about teaching ponies tricks,” Daniel said.

Mr. Stocking rolled his chew to one side and spat. “Any fool can teach 'em tricks. Teaching 'em trust, now, that's the hard part.” Mr. Stocking's finger thumped Daniel on the forehead before he could respond. “Think, son,” he said. “Everything you need is in
here.” He prodded Daniel's chest just over his heart. “And in here. Just think on how you trained Ivy.”

Daniel laughed. “I never. She's the one trained me.”

“There you have it.” Mr. Stocking clapped Daniel on the back and spun him to face the ponies. “I'll check up on you 'round dinnertime,” the peddler called out as he walked away.

Daniel walked over to where Ivy stood tethered to the fence. “Maybe you ought to be taming them ponies, eh, lass?” He pressed his forehead against hers, closed his eyes, and tried to remember how it had been, those first few months before he'd won Ivy over.

When Ivy had come to Lyman's, she'd been trained to saddle and harness, and minded well enough in either. But once out to pasture, she'd no use for a scrawny stick of a lad whose only knowledge of horses was how to clean up the messes they left behind. She'd let him get within a whisker of her, then she'd kick up her heels and canter off, spurning him with a toss of her head. An afternoon of it had brought him nearer to tears than Lyman's thrashings.

So what had he done about it? Oh, aye, he remembered now: he'd sulked.

He sat in the grass hugging his knees to his chest, sunk so deep into his black mood that he lost all sense of time and place until something ruffled the hair at the crown of his head. Without looking up, he tried to brush it away, and his hand found something both whiskery-prickly and velvety soft. A spluttery snort showered him with wet, and Ivy pranced away, the bloody witch. Well, he was done with that game. Just to show her how little he cared, he pulled out the apple he'd planned to give her and began to eat it himself
.

Her hooves swooshed in the long grass behind him, her questing nose snuffled at his ear. He hunched over his apple, keeping his back to her. He ate the apple down to a knob of seeds and pith and stem, then sucked the last of the juice from it with loud slurps to show her what a treat she'd missed. “So there,” he said, showing her the meager remains
.

Her breath tickled his wrist as she studied the remnant of apple, its ivory flesh already starting to yellow. Her lips moved across his palm
with as little weight as a caterpillar wriggling in his hand. The core disappeared down her throat with one hollow crunch. She whuffed a soft breath in his ear before she walked away
.

By summer's end, he could barely remember when she'd not been a part of him
.

“Is that the way of it, lass?” he asked, stirring from the memory. “Turn me back on 'em?” She butted his chest with her nose. “All right, then,” he said. “We'd best get started.”

For the rest of the morning, Daniel sat on a milking stool in the middle of the paddock, studying the ponies while pretending to have no interest in them. He observed the minute changes in the angle of an ear, the flare of a nostril, the rhythm of each pony's breath. He watched how each muscle and tendon flexed and contracted beneath the ponies' dusty hides, the impact of each hoof in the dirt and whether it landed true or crooked. He noticed how the ponies looked to the little gray mare for their cues, and how they stood guard on her, not because she was weak, but because they seemed to depend on her.

At the end of the morning, he rose with stiff legs and a numb backside but a confident heart. After dinner, he returned to test what he'd learned. He studied how they responded to an outstretched arm, an open hand or a closed one, an upright stance or a slouch. How he angled his head, the carriage of his body, and where he directed his eyes could turn them wary or calm. He put Ivy in among them. She stirred them up, then with a nip and a flick of her heels displaced the gray mare as their leader. When Ivy came to him, he watched the ponies watching him, their reluctant interest reminding him of the audience observing Mr. Chamberlain's conjuring act with suspicion and fascination.

Shadows stretched across the pen, and a cool breeze told him the afternoon had waned. The wind stirred the ponies' manes and tails, chilling the sweat on Daniel's body. The outside world came back into focus: the house and barn and sheds of the farmer who'd rented his field to Mr. Chamberlain; the pavilions and the
wagons and people milling around them; the noises from the menagerie tent.

He blinked and rubbed his eyes. A strange fluttering around his heart warmed him from inside, even though the late September wind stung his ears.

“Not a bad day's work, eh, son?” Mr. Stocking leaned on the top fence rail, hands together, elbows out, his chin resting on his threaded fingers, his right foot propped up on the bottom rail. Billy stood next to him in an identical pose, except that her head rested one rail lower than Mr. Stocking's.

“How long you been watching?” Daniel asked.

“Long enough,” Mr. Stocking said. “Tired?”

Daniel shook his head as he walked toward them. “Nah. I could do this all day.” He ran a hand along his jaw. “Funny thing, though. Me face feels a bit queer—sort'a achy.”

Mr. Stocking laughed so hard he nearly choked on his tobacco. “Never smiled so much in your life, huh, Dan'l?” he finally said, gasping.

“Grinning like a monkey, you was—
were
—this past hour 'r more,” Billy said.

“I think maybe he's grown an inch or two as well, don't you, son?” Mr. Stocking said, giving Billy a nudge and a wink.

Although he knew the peddler was only twitting him, Daniel did indeed feel taller. Older and surer, too, as if he'd started working the ponies as one person but finished as another.

“Congratulations, Dan'l.” Mr. Stocking reached over the fence to shake his hand. “You've found your place.” The peddler's green eyes held him fast, as warm as the handshake.

The warmth inside Daniel quickly faded, though, as a lanky figure strode over to the fence. “You put them ponies through their paces, boy?” Mr. Chamberlain said, rubbing his hands together briskly.

“I—uh—not exactly, sir.” Daniel instinctively stepped back, suddenly glad of the fence between them.

“What've you been doing all day? I got to get them back into the show soon's I can.”

“I need to sort 'em out first. Learn their ways and let 'em learn mine.” Daniel's throat tightened, making his voice timid and squeaky. His mind became a slate suddenly wiped clean. He looked to the peddler for support, but Mr. Stocking had turned away, one arm draped over Billy's shoulder in private conversation.

“What's to learn?” Mr. Chamberlain pinned Daniel with a glare as sharp as his ravens' beaks. “You think I don't know everything that goes on around here, boy? I told you to run those ponies through their paces, not sit on your backside all morning or stand around and wave your arms at 'em all afternoon.”

The ache in Daniel's jaw was no longer from smiling, but from clenching his teeth. The green, secret place inside of him tugged at the edge of his mind. He pushed back against it, forced himself to reply. “I'll start schooling 'em in earnest tomorrow, I promise you, sir.”

“They're schooled plenty already. All you got to do is step in where Neezer left off.” The hard line of Mr. Chamberlain's mouth softened. “Look, boy, I know you never worked any trick ponies before. But it's not that much different from getting 'em to plow or draw or run. All you got to do is take a switch to 'em, and they'll be prancing up a storm in no time. Just—”

“No. No switches. No chains or mustard plasters or whatever your Perfesser used to torment 'em—”

“I'll have none of your sass, boy!” Mr. Chamberlain loomed over Daniel, glaring like a snake eyeing a mouse. Daniel braced himself not to stagger from the long, bony finger that Mr. Chamberlain stabbed against his breastbone to drive his words home. “Neezer broke them ponies just fine, and he—”

Daniel dug his nails into the fence's gray, weathered wood. He fought the urge to snap the showman's poking finger in half. “Aye, he broke 'em, all right. Your bloody Neezer broke 'em into a million pieces.” He spat into the dirt at Mr. Chamberlain's feet. “Well, sir, it ain't breaking that them ponies are needing. It's mending. And that's what I'm bloody well doing.” He shoved himself back from
the fence and spun away from the conjurer to return to the ponies that he had already begun to think of as his own.

“You testing him out, Fred, or are you just an ass?” Jonathan asked, admiring the obstinate set to Daniel's shoulders as the boy stalked away.

Jonathan nudged Billy. “Go help Dan'l get those horses fed and watered.” The girl's glance darted from the Irish boy to Jonathan to Fred, betraying her dilemma: to work with the ponies she'd been yearning after all day, or to stay and eavesdrop on what promised to be an entertaining quarrel between the peddler and the showman. Jonathan lowered his head and peered sternly over his spectacles at her. “Go.”

Billy rolled her eyes as she squeezed between the fence rails, but the eager trot that took her to the ponies revealed where her true preference lay.

“You hear the way he answered me back?” Fred went on. “You let your boy talk that way to you?”

“I hope he would, if I was ever being an ass. Anyway, he's not my boy.”

“I give him a job, a God-almighty opportunity any boy would give his eyeteeth for, and what does he do? He spends the day playing and making pets of my ponies.”

Jonathan spat out his chew and ground it into the dirt.

“Damn it, they're mine, not
his
.” Fred waved toward Daniel with a contemptuous motion that stopped mid-gesture as Ivy whirled toward the boy, drawing the ponies in her wake.

“Not yet. Give him a few more days with 'em, and they'll think they are.” Jonathan watched Daniel teach Billy how to use posture and eyes and hand motions to draw the ponies in or send them away. Already he was experimenting with using one gesture to summon the ponies individually, and another to bring them together as a group. Billy mimicked him gleefully.

“I don't care what they think–it's what they do that concerns me,” Fred said. “Every day those ponies aren't working is money out of my pocket.”

“You'll have your show, Fred. Or, should I say, your ‘cultural and educational exhibition of equitational achievement'?”

Fred darted Jonathan a quick sideways glance, his cheek growing taut as if he had to bite it to keep his expression stern.

“I'll vouch for Dan'l,” Jonathan continued, “and you know
I
was never one to let
you
down. I'm still sharp as ever when it comes to judging folks.”

“Are you?” Fred asked, his eyes returning to Daniel and Billy and the ponies. “Seems to me you've got a little soft around the edges in your old age.”

“Not the edges, just the middle.” Jonathan patted his belly. “I still know a promising boy when I see one. Dan'l will get a better show out'a those ponies than your Neezer ever could.”

“Spoiling 'em, that's what he's doing.” Fred rested one elegantly booted foot on the bottom rail and settled his elbows along the top of the fence. “Mending horses, indeed.” He reached into his vest pocket and pulled out two segars, trimmed their ends, and handed one to Jonathan. With his eyes still on the ponies, Fred flicked a lucifer against the fence post, lit his own segar, and held out the match for Jonathan to do the same. It wasn't until he'd blown the first puff of smoke out that he turned back to the peddler. By this time, Daniel and Billy were in the far corner of the pen, the ponies gathered around them expectantly, like children waiting for a treat. “I got to say, though, that's the first time I ever saw those beasts standing on the same side of the ring as their trainer without being forced into it.”