The Horse Whisperer

by Nicholas Evans

  Tom sat at the table going through a stack of old Quarter Horse Journals, looking for a piece he remembered reading a couple of years back. It was by a Californian horse trainer he’d once met and was about a young mare who’d been in a bad wreck. They’d been shipping her over from Kentucky along with six other horses and somewhere in Arizona the guy towing the trailer had fallen asleep, driven off the road and the whole rig had flipped clean over. The trailer ended up lying on the side where the door was so the rescue folk had to get chainsaws and cut their way in. When they did they found the horses had been tied into their boxes and were hanging in the air by their necks from what was now the roof, all but the mare dead.

  This trainer, Tom knew, had a pet theory that you could use a horse’s natural response to pain to help it. It was complicated and Tom wasn’t sure he fully grasped it. It seemed to be based on the notion that though a horse’s first instinct was to flee, when it actually felt pain, it would turn and face it.

  The man backed this up with stories of how horses in the wild would run from a pack of wolves but when they felt teeth touch their flanks they would “turn in” and confront the pain. He said it was like a baby teething; he doesn’t avoid the pain, but bites on it. And he claimed this theory had helped him sort out the traumatized mare who’d survived the wreck.

  Tom found the right issue and read the piece again, hoping it might shed some light on what to do with Pilgrim. It was kind of short on detail but it seemed all the guy had really done was take the mare back to basics as if he were starting her afresh, helping her find herself, making the right thing easy and wrong thing difficult. It was fine, but there was nothing new there for Tom. He was doing that already. As for the turningin-to-pain thing, he still couldn’t make a lot of sense of it. But what was he doing? Looking for a new trick? There were no tricks, he should know that by now. It was just you and the horse and understanding what was going on in both your heads. He pushed the magazine away, sat back and sighed.

  Listening to Grace this evening and earlier to Logan, he’d searched every corner of what they said for something to latch on to, some key, some lever he could use. But there was none. And now at last he understood what he’d been seeing all this time in Pilgrim’s eyes. It was a total breakdown. The animal’s confidence, in himself and all around him, had been shattered. Those he had loved and trusted had betrayed him. Grace, Gulliver, everyone. They’d led him up that slope, pretended it was safe and then screamed at him and hurt him when it turned out not to be.

  Maybe Pilgrim even blamed himself for what happened. For why should humans think they had a monopoly on guilt? So often Tom had seen horses protect their riders, children especially, from the dangers that inexperience led them into. Pilgrim had let Grace down. And when he’d tried to protect her from the truck, all he’d gotten in return was pain and punishment. Then all those strangers, who’d tricked him and caught him and hurt him and jabbed their needles in his neck and locked him up in the dark and the filth and the stench.

  Later, as he lay sleepless with the light out and the house long fallen quiet, Tom felt something float heavily within him and settle on his heart. He now had the picture he’d wanted or as much of it as he was likely to get and it was a picture as dark and devoid of hope as he’d ever known.

  There was no delusion, nothing foolish or fanciful about the way Pilgrim had assessed the horrors that had befallen him. It was simply logical and it was this that made helping him so hard. And Tom wanted so very much to help him. He wanted it for the horse itself and for the girl. But he knew too—and knew at the same time that it was wrong—that above all he wanted it for the woman he’d ridden with that morning and whose eyes and mouth he could see as clearly as if she were lying there beside him.

  TWENTY-ONE

  THE NIGHT MATTHEW GRAVES DIED, ANNIE AND HER brother were staying with friends in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica. It was the end of the Christmas holiday and her parents had gone back down to Kingston and left them up there for a few more days because they were having such fun. Annie and George, her brother, were sharing a double bed, tented by a vast mosquito net into which, in the middle of the night, their friends’ mother came in her nightgown to wake them. She turned on the bedside light and sat on the end of the bed waiting for Annie and George to rub the sleep from their eyes. Dimly through the gauze of the mosquito net, Annie could see the woman’s husband, hovering in his striped pajamas, his face in shadow.

  Annie would always remember the strange smile on the woman’s face. Later she understood it was a smile born of fear at what she had to say, but in that moment when sleep and consciousness elide, her expression seemed humorous, so when the woman said she had bad news and that their father was dead, Annie thought it was a joke. Not a very funny one, but still a joke.

  Many years later, when Annie thought she should do something about her insomnia (an urge that came upon her every four or five years and led only to large amounts of money being paid to hear things she already knew), she had been to see a hypnotherapist. The woman’s technique was “event oriented.” This apparently meant that she liked her clients to come up with some incident that marked the onset of whatever particular mess they were in. She would then pop you into a trance, take you back and resolve it.

  After the first hundred-dollar session the poor woman was clearly disappointed that Annie couldn’t come up with an appropriate incident, so for a week Annie had racked her brain to find one. She’d talked it over with Robert and it was he who came up with it: Annie being woken at the age of ten to be told her father was dead.

  The therapist nearly fell off her chair with excitement. Annie felt pretty pleased too, like one of those girls she’d always hated at school who sat in the front row with their hands in the air. Don’t go to sleep because someone you love might die. It didn’t come much neater. The fact that for the next twenty years Annie had slept each night like a log didn’t seem to bother the woman.

  She asked Annie what she felt about her father and then what she felt about her mother, and after Annie had told her, she asked how she felt about doing “a little separation exercise.” Annie said that would be fine. The woman then tried to hypnotize her but was so excited she did it too fast and there wasn’t a hope in hell it would work. Not to disappoint her, Annie did her best to fake a trance but had a lot of trouble keeping a straight face when the woman stood her parents on spinning silver discs and dispatched them one by one, waving serene farewells, into outer space.

  But if her father’s death, as Annie actually believed, had no connection with her inability to sleep, its effect on almost everything else in her life was immeasurable.

  Within a month of the funeral, her mother had packed up the house in Kingston and disposed of things around which her children had felt their lives revolved. She sold the small boat in which their father had taught them to sail and had taken them to deserted islands to dive among the coral for lobsters and run naked on the palmed white sand. And their dog, a black Labrador cross called Bella, she gave to a neighbor they hardly knew. They saw the dog watching from the gate as the taxi took them to the airport.

  They flew to England, a strange, wet, cold place where nobody smiled and their mother left them in Devon with her parents while she went up to London to sort out, she said, her husband’s affairs. She lost no time in sorting one out for herself too, for within six months she was to marry again.

  Annie’s grandfather was a gentle, ineffectual soul who smoked a pipe, did crossword puzzles and whose main concern in life was avoiding the wrath or even mild displeasure of his wife. Annie’s grandmother was a small, malicious woman with a tight white perm through which the pink of her scalp glowed like a warning. Her dislike of children was neither greater nor less than her dislike of almost everything else in life. But whereas most of these things were abstract or inanimate or simply unaware, of her dislike, from these, her only grandchildren, she derived a much more gratifying return and set about making their stay, over the ens
uing months, as miserable as possible.

  She favored George, not because she disliked him less but in order to divide them and thus make Annie, in whose eye she was quick to spot defiance, all the more unhappy. She told Annie her life in “The Colonies” had given her vulgar, slovenly ways which she set about curing by sending her to bed with no supper and smacking her legs, for the most trivial of crimes, with a long-handled wooden spoon. Their mother, who traveled down by train to see them each weekend, listened impartially to what her children told her. Inquests of stunning objectivity were held and Annie learned for the first time how facts could be so subtly rearranged to render different truths.

  “The child has such a vivid imagination,” her grandmother said.

  Reduced to mute contempt and acts of petty vengeance, Annie stole cigarettes from the witch’s purse and smoked them behind dripping rhododendrons, greenly contemplating how unwise it was to love, for those you loved would only die and leave you.

  Her father had been a bounding, joyous man. The only one who ever thought she was of value. And since his death, her life had been a ceaseless quest to prove him right. Through school and through her student days and on through her career, she’d been driven by that single purpose: to show the bastards.

  For a while, after having Grace, she’d thought the point proven. In that pinched pink face, hungering so blind and needy at her nipple, came calm, as if the journey were complete. It had been a time for definitions. Now, she told herself, now I can be what I am, not what I do. Then came the miscarriage. Then another and another and another, failure compounding failure and soon Annie was again that pale, angry girl behind the rhododendrons. She’d shown them before and she’d show them again.

  But it wasn’t like before. Since her early days at Rolling Stone, those parts of the news media that followed such matters had dubbed her “brilliant and fiery*” Now, reincarnated as boss of her own magazine—the kind of job she’d vowed never to take—the first of these epithets stuck. But, as if in recognition of the colder fuel that drove her, “fiery” transmuted to “ruthless” In fact, Annie had surprised even herself with the casual brutality she’d brought to her latest post.

  Last fall she’d met an old friend from England, a woman who’d been at the same boarding school and when Annie told her about all the bloodletting at the magazine she’d laughed and said did Annie remember playing Lady Macbeth in the school play? Annie did. In fact, though she didn’t say this, she remembered being rather good.

  “Remember how you stuck your arms in that bucket of fake blood for the ‘Out, damned spot’ speech? You were red right up to the elbows!”

  “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 kno
w 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.