The Horse Whisperer (29 page)

“Yep. Sure was one hell of a spot.”

Annie laughed along but went away and worried about the image for a whole afternoon, until she decided it wasn’t even remotely relevant to her present situation because Lady Macbeth was doing it for her husband’s career not her own and in any case was clearly out of her tree. The following day, perhaps to prove a point, she had fired Fenimore Fiske.

Now, from the fatuous vantage of her office in exile, Annie reflected on such deeds and on the losses within her that had prompted them. Some of these things she had glimpsed that night at Little Bighorn when she’d slumped by the stone etched with the names of dead men and wept. Here, in this place of sky, she now came to see them more clearly, as if their secrets were unfurling with the season itself. And with a bereaved stillness
born of this knowledge, as May slipped by, she watched the separate world outside grow warm and green.

Only when she was with him did she feel part of it. Three times more he had come to her door with the horses and they had ridden out together to other places he wanted to show her.

It had become routine that on Wednesdays Diane collected Grace from the clinic and sometimes on other days she or Frank might take her there too if they had to go to town. These mornings, Annie would catch herself waiting for Tom’s call to ask if she wanted to ride and when it came she would try not to sound too eager.

The last time, she’d been in the middle of a conference call and she’d looked down toward the corrals and seen him leading Rimrock and a colt, both saddled, from the barn and she’d quite lost the drift of the conversation. She was suddenly aware that everyone in New York had gone silent.

“Annie?” one of the senior editors said.

“Yeah, sorry,” Annie said. “I’m getting all this static this end. I lost that last bit.”

When Tom arrived, the conference was still going and she waved him in through the screen door. He took off his hat and came through and Annie mouthed to him that she was sorry and to help himself to coffee. He did and settled himself on the arm of the couch to wait.

There were a couple of recent issues of her magazine lying there and he’d picked one up and looked through it. He found her name at the top of the page where it listed everyone who worked there and he made an impressed face. Then she saw him grinning to himself over another style piece of Lucy Friedman’s, called “The New Rednecks.” They’d taken a couple of models to some godforsaken place in Arkansas and shot them
draped over the real thing, unsmiling men with beer guts, tattoos and guns slung in their pickup windows. Annie wondered how the photographer, a brilliant, outrageous man who wore mascara and liked to show everyone his pierced nipples, had escaped with his life.

It was ten minutes before the conference call finished and Annie, aware of Tom listening, became more and more self-conscious. She realized she was talking’ in a more dignified way than normal to impress him and immediately felt foolish. Gathered around the speaker phone in her office in New York, Lucy and the others must have wondered what she was on. When it was over she hung up and turned to him.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, I liked hearing you work. And now I know what to wear next time I go down to Arkansas.” He tossed the magazine onto the couch. “It’s a lot of fun.”

“It’s a lot of pain. Mostly in the ass.”

She was already in her riding clothes and they went right out to the horses. She said she’d try the stirrups a little longer and he came and showed her how to do it because the straps were different from those she was used to. She stepped in close to watch how he did it and for the first time she was aware of the smell of him, a warm clean smell of leather and some functional brand of soap. All the while, the tops of their arms touched lightly and neither of them moved away.

That morning they’d crossed over to the southern creek and made their way slowly up beside it to a place he said they might see beavers. But they saw none, only the two intricate new islands they’d built. They dismounted and sat on the gray bleached trunk of a fallen cottonwood while the horses drank their own reflections from the pool.

A fish or a frog broke the surface in front of the colt and he leapt back scared like some character in a cartoon. Rimrock gave him a weary look and went on drinking. Tom laughed. He got up and walked over and when he got there he put one hand on the colt’s neck and another on his face. For a while he just stood there holding him. Annie couldn’t hear if he spoke but she noticed that the horse seemed to be listening. And without any coaxing, he went back to the water and after a few wary sniffs, drank as if nothing had happened. Tom came back and saw her smile and shake her head.

“What’s the matter?”

“How do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Make him feel it was okay.”

“Oh, he knew it was okay.” She waited for him to go on. “He gets a little melodramatic sometimes.”

“And how do you know that?”

He gave her the same amused look he’d given her that day when she’d asked him all those questions about his wife and son.

“You get to learn.” He stopped and something in her face must have told him she felt rebuked because he smiled and went on.

“It’s only the difference between looking and seeing. Look long enough and if you’re doing it right you get to see. Same with your job. You know what makes a good piece for your magazine because you’ve spent time making it your business to know.”

Annie laughed. “Yeah, like designer rednecks?”

“Yeah, that’s right. I wouldn’t guess in a million years that’s what people Want to read about.”

“They don’t.”

“Sure they do. It’s funny.”

“It’s dumb.”

It came out harsh and with a finality that left a silence hanging between them. He was watching her and she softened and gave him a self-deprecating smile.

“It’s dumb and patronizing and phony.”

“There’s some serious stuff there too.”

“Oh, yeah. But who needs it?”

He shrugged. Annie looked over at the horses. They’d drunk their fill and were browsing the new grass at the water’s edge.

“What you do is real,” she said.

As they rode back, Annie told him about the books she’d found in the public library, about whisperers and witchcraft and so forth and he laughed and said sure, he’d read some of that stuff too and he’d sure wished a fair few times that he was a witch. He knew about Sullivan and J. S. Rarey.

“Some of those guys—not Rarey, he was a real horseman—but some of the others, they did things that looked like magic but were just downright cruel. You know, things like pouring lead shot in a horse’s ear, so the sound of it would paralyze him with fear and people would say wow, look, he’s tamed that crazy horse! What they didn’t know was that he’d probably killed it too.”

He said that many times a troubled horse would get worse before he got better and you had to let him do that, let him go beyond the brink, to hell and back even. And she didn’t answer because she knew he wasn’t just talking about Pilgrim but about something greater that involved them all.

She knew that Grace had talked to Tom about the accident, not from him but from overhearing Grace tell Robert on the phone a few days later. This had become one of Grace’s favorite tricks, letting Annie learn things by proxy so she could gauge the precise extent of her
exclusion. On the night in question, Annie had been taking a bath upstairs and lay there listening through the open door—as Grace knew she must be, for she made no attempt to lower her voice.

She hadn’t gone into detail, simply told Robert she’d remembered more than she expected about what had happened and that she felt better for having talked about it. Later, Annie had waited to be told herself but knew it wasn’t going to happen.

For a while she’d felt angry with Tom, as if somehow he’d invaded their lives. She’d been curt with him the next day.

“I hear Grace told you all about the accident?”

“Yes, she did,” he said, almost matter-of-fact. And that was all. It was clear he saw it as something between him and Grace and when Annie got over her anger, she respected him for this and remembered that it wasn’t he who’d invaded their lives but the other way around.

Tom rarely spoke to her about Grace and when he did it was about things that were safe and factual. But Annie knew he saw how it was between them, for who could not?

T
HE CALVES HUDDLED AT THE FAR END OF THE MUDDY
corral, trying to hide behind each other and using their wet black noses to push each other forward. When one of them got shunted to the front you could see panic set in and when it got too much he’d break around to the back and the whole thing would start over again.

It was the Saturday morning before Memorial Day and the twins were showing Joe and Grace how good they’d gotten at roping. Scott, whose turn it was, had on a pair of brand-new chaps and a hat that was a size too big for him. He’d already knocked it off a couple of times swinging the loop. Each time Joe and Craig had whooped with laughter and Scott had got red and done his best to look as if he found it funny too. He’d been swinging the rope in the air so long that Grace was getting dizzy watching.

“Shall we come back next week?” Joe said.

“I’m picking, okay?”

“They’re over there. Black, with four legs and a tail?”

“Okay, smartass.”

“Well jeez, just throw the damn thing.”

“Okay! Okay!”

Joe shook his head and gave Grace a grin. They were sitting side by side on the top rail and Grace still felt proud of herself for having climbed up there. She did it like it was nothing and though it hurt like hell where the bar now pressed into her stump she wasn’t going to budge.

She had on a new pair of Wranglers she and Diane had spent a long time finding in Great Falls and she knew they looked good because she’d spent half an hour in front of the bathroom mirror this morning checking them out. Thanks to Terri, the muscles in her right butt filled them out well. It was funny, back in New York she wouldn’t have been seen dead in anything other than Levi’s, but out here everyone wore Wranglers. The guy in the store said it was because the seams on the inside leg were more comfy for riding.

“I’m better’n you are anyway,” Scott said.

“You sure swing a bigger loop.”

Joe jumped down into the corral and walked across the mud toward the calves.

“Joe! Get out the way will ya?”

“Don’t pee your pants. I’m gonna make it easier for you, break ‘em up some.”

As he got nearer, the calves moved off till they were bunched in the corner. Their only escape now was to make a break and Grace could see the worry grow among them till it was set to erupt. Joe stopped. One more step and they’d go.

“Ready?” he called.

Scott bit on his bottom lip and swung the loop a little quicker so it made a whirring noise in the air. He nodded and Joe stepped forward. Right away the calves broke for the other corner. Scott gave a little unintended cry of effort as he threw it. The rope snaked
through the air and landed with its loop clean over the head of the leading calf.

“Yeah!” he yelled and yanked it tight.

But the triumph lasted only a second, for as soon as the calf felt the loop tighten he was away and Scott went with him. He left his hat hanging in the air and slapped headfirst onto the mud like a diver in a swimming race.

“Let go! Let it go!” Joe kept hollering, but maybe Scott didn’t hear or maybe his pride didn’t let him because he hung on to the rope as if his hands were glued to it and off he went. What the calf lacked in size he made up for in spirit and he jumped and bucked and kicked like a steer in a rodeo show, sledging the boy behind him through the mud.

Grace put her hands to her face in alarm and nearly toppled back off the rail. But once they could see Scott was only hanging in there because he wanted to, Joe and Craig started to whoop and laugh. And still he didn’t let go. The calf took him from one end of the corral to the other and back again while the other calves stood bemused.

The noise brought Diane running from the house but Tom and Frank, from the barn, beat her to it. They got to the rail beside Grace just as Scott let go.

He lay quite still, face down in the mud and everyone went quiet. Oh no, Grace thought, oh no. At the same moment Diane arrived and gave a frightened cry.

One hand slowly lifted itself from the mud, in a kind of comical salute. Then, theatrically, the boy lifted himself up and turned to face them, standing before them in the middle of the corral to let them have their laugh. And so they did. And when Grace saw Scott’s teeth show white in an otherwise perfect coat of brown, she joined in. And together they laughed loud and long and
Grace felt part of them and that life perhaps might yet be good.

   A half-hour later everyone had dispersed. Diane had taken Scott back into the house to clean up and Frank, who wanted Tom’s opinion on a calf he was worried about, had driven him and Craig up to the meadow. Annie had gone down to Great Falls to buy food for what she insisted on calling, to Grace’s embarrassment, “the dinner party” to which she’d invited the Booker family that evening. So now it was just the two of them, Grace and Joe, and it was Joe who suggested they go down to see Pilgrim.

Pilgrim now had a corral to himself next to the colts Tom was starting and whose interest, over the double fence, he returned with a mix: of suspicion and disdain. He saw Grace and Joe from a long way off and started snorting and nickering and trotting up and down the neurotic, muddy track he’d churned along the far side of the corral.

The rutted grass made walking a little tricky but Grace concentrated on swinging her leg through and although she knew Joe walked more slowly than he normally would, it didn’t worry her. She felt as easy with him as she did with Tom. They reached the gate to Pilgrim’s corral and leaned there to watch him.

“He was such a beautiful horse,” she said.

“He still is.”

Grace nodded. She told him about that day, almost a year ago, when they went down to Kentucky. And while she spoke, across the corral, Pilgrim seemed to be acting out some perverse parody of the events she described. He paced the rail in a mocking strut with his
tail held high, but it was matted and twitched and was angled, Grace knew, by fear not pride.