Gift Horse

by Dandi Daley Mackall

  Mr. Barker leaned forward from the backseat. “I thought that horse looked too old.”

  “She is too old!” Dad snapped, so solemnlike the whole car, except for William, went silent again until we reached the church.

  Once inside, we headed for the Barker pew. Halfway down the aisle, I stopped. Catman, who always arrives late and makes a grand entrance to the organ music, was already there. And next to him sat M, in a black turtleneck and black jeans.

  As far as I knew, M had never seen the inside of a church. I’d only met his parents once, and I liked them a lot. They made it into the Mansfield News Journal and even the Akron Beacon Journal from time to time for demonstrating against a nuclear power plant or for boycotting a store that sells the wrong kind of tuna. But they weren’t churchgoers.

  M scooted about six inches from Catman, and I squeezed between them. I had to sit with my shoulders scrunched to my ears, which may be why I didn’t hear all the announcements. Or it might have been because I couldn’t get my mind off Gracie.

  “Clue us in,” Catman whispered. “M wants the skinny on that horse.”

  I was sitting three millimeters from M and hadn’t heard him ask anything, but I relayed what the vet had said.

  M shut his eyes.

  Ralph Evans greeted us pretty much the same way he welcomes customers to the animal shelter. I like that he doesn’t have a Sunday Ralph different from the regular Ralph. He wore a gray shirt instead of the white lab coat. But he talked exactly the same. “I sure hope everybody’s coming to the Christmas Eve celebration.”

  “Right-on!” Catman shouted.

  Nobody else shouted anything. But they didn’t seem to mind the Catman.

  I caught Dad scoping out the back pews and knew he was hoping Madeline and Mason would show up. He’d been inviting them every Sunday, but so far they hadn’t made it.

  We stood to sing a couple of Christmas carols, which was a relief from being squished in the pew. Then Ralph started his sermon. He’d been giving Christmasy sermons since Thanksgiving.

  “Last week we talked about that angel who came to see Mary and give her the big news that she was picked out of everybody to be the mother of God’s Son. But I want to tell you about another message Mary got, this one from an old prophet named Simeon. He’d been waiting for the Messiah his whole life. So when Mary and Joseph walked into the temple with their baby, Simeon knew who it was. He told Mary that Jesus would do great things and save all the people. Then he added, like a P.S.: ‘And a sword will pierce your very soul.’

  “Mary got promised joy and pain, side by side. And you know—we get the same promise. It’s part of the same package: life and death; pain of childbirth and the joy of a child born.”

  That’s where I stopped listening and started wondering. Would it be like that with Gracie and her foal? Pain, then joy? Joy, then pain? I didn’t want her to suffer. I couldn’t stand it if she suffered.

  Why couldn’t everybody just skip all the pain part and go straight to the joy?

  After church, I told Catman and M good-bye, but M followed me to the Barker Bus.

  “Need a ride, M?” Mrs. Barker asked. “Hop in.”

  The whole way to our house M kept up a whispering conversation with Granny B in the front seat. When we got to our house, he hopped out with Dad, Lizzy, and me, although he lives in the government housing apartments on the other side of town.

  “You’re welcome, M,” Granny B called, although I hadn’t heard M say thanks.

  Dad and Lizzy walked to the house, but I headed straight for the barn. I was wearing a denim dress Lizzy got at Goodwill, so I didn’t feel like I had to change.

  M followed me.

  Nickers whinnied from the pasture and trotted into her stall to meet me. I slipped in with her and hugged her neck, grateful for her fresh, horse smell.

  M got into the stall with Gracie.

  “She needs exercise, M,” I suggested, thinking about the way Mom used to keep the brood-mares active right up to foaling.

  I handed him a brush and leadrope. He brushed her mane, then looked like he didn’t know what to do next.

  “You can give her a once-over with the brush. Then lead her outside to the paddock and just walk her around.” It occurred to me that I seemed to be answering questions he hadn’t asked. Or had he?

  The only sounds in the barn were the swish, swish of the brushes as we stroked the horses. Nelson, my barn cat, leaped out of nowhere and jumped onto Nickers’ back. Catman had given me the little black kitten with one white paw soon after I’d taken over the barn. Catman still has the parent cats, Wilhemina and Churchill. He named my cat Nelson because the real Winston Churchill had a cat named Nelson.

  Nickers didn’t complain as the cat curled up on her and purred.

  “What—? Whoa now!” M, hands up, jumped back from Gracie.

  I hurried into their stall. “What’s wrong, M?”

  He stared at the old mare. His eyes were rimmed with white. If he’d been a horse, he would have been a scared Arabian. “It . . . that is, she . . .” He pointed to Gracie’s belly.

  “Did you feel a kick?” I felt the mare’s flank, and M laid his hand next to mine. We didn’t move for a long time. Then I felt it. “It kicked!” I cried, biting my lip so I wouldn’t bawl like a baby.

  M put his head against Gracie’s side and listened. “I hear it!” he whispered, grinning. He had dimples. Who knew?

  “Everything okay out here?” Lizzy called, trotting into the barn.

  “We felt the foal kick, Lizzy!” I said.

  “Sweet!” she exclaimed, tiptoeing closer to Gracie’s stall and peeking in. “That’s good, right?”

  “That’s great!” I agreed.

  M and I listened to Gracie’s belly again but didn’t hear anything.

  “Oh!” Lizzy exclaimed. “I almost forgot why I came out here. Thought you might be hungry.” Lizzy does all of our creative cooking.

  “What did you make this time, Lizzy?” I asked, my stomach growling.

  “Nothing! Madeline and Mason came over and brought pizza. It’s just plain pepperoni. But I’ll put extra things on for anybody who wants them . . . cherry tomatoes, celery, leftover tuna casserole, potato chips.”

  M led the way, and Lizzy and I followed him into the house for pizza.

  Pepperoni-pizza slices were served on individual, waterproof, battery-operated plates. These “power plates” were Madeline’s invention. She won first prize at the Chicago Invention Convention, either for helium furniture or her automatic, house-greeting security system. I can’t remember, and I’m not about to ask.

  Mason, who hadn’t even met M before, sat on his lap and watched him eat pizza slices backwards, starting at the wide, crust end and finishing at the tip. Halfway through my second slice, I heard Mason giggle. He and M had each eaten their slices into the shape of an M.

  When we finished, Madeline showed us how the dishes were self-cleaning. Each plate had its own windshield wipers, stuck like rubber hoses to the sides of the plate. She still needed our water though.

  Mason followed M when we got up to go back to the barn.

  “Come on back, Mason,” his mom called.

  “Towaco?” Mason asked. Then louder, “Go, Towaco!”

  Dad shot me a dirty look, like it was my fault Mason had fallen in love with Hawk’s Appaloosa. He and Madeline had been happy enough when horse therapy worked and Mason really got into the riding lessons. Now they both acted like they wished it had never happened.

  I knelt down to Mason-level. “Mason, you remember that Towaco’s on vacation with Hawk, right? They’ll both be back New Year’s. Then you can hang out with the Appy again, deal?”

  “I want to see the other Towaco, the mommy horse,” he said softly.

  I didn’t know what to say. He’s so much smarter than we give him credit for. Just from listening to all of us, he must have figured out that Gracie was having a foal. It made me wonder what else he’d figured out.


  I’d asked Madeline and Dad about Mason a couple of times, why he was the way he was. Madeline never said much, only that something happened to his head, some trauma, when he was little and that whatever happened to him makes him act autistic sometimes. He can tune out the whole world when he wants to, which I kind of admire.

  “Winnie, how could you tell him that horse is having a baby? You know it doesn’t have a chance of—” Dad stopped. I imagined smoke coming out of his ears.

  “Me? I didn’t tell him anything!”

  Madeline had one long arm wrapped across her skinny stomach and the other hand over her mouth. “Oh, Mason—”

  M reached down, and in one motion, scooped Mason up and onto his shoulders. “Little M,” Big M said, “Gracie isn’t a mom yet, and she may not be. She’s sick. Understand?”

  Mason held onto M’s black ponytail and nodded. “I understand.”

  M turned to Madeline. “Barn okay?”

  You could tell how much Madeline didn’t want to say okay. I think if she had her wish, she’d never let Mason out of the safety of his room, where even the furniture, all helium, can be floated up to the ceiling and out of the way. “Well, I guess,” she finally answered. “But be careful!”

  Be careful? Brother. There went our master plan of feeding him to the lions.

  In the barn, I showed M and Mason where I store the grass hay. The Amish grow it and mow it, leaving in the wildflowers and clover. “It’s softer than regular hay, softer than straw, and the best bedding Gracie could hope for.”

  Mason helped M carry grass hay to Gracie’s stall until I told them to stop. And that wasn’t until it was two feet high.

  “Stable-Mart uses wood shavings,” I explained as I took care of Nickers’ stall. My horse doesn’t spend much time in the barn though. She’d rather be outside, even in a blizzard.

  “Yuck!” Mason said.

  “You’re right, Mason!” I agreed. “Wood shavings are yucky! They may look good and be easy to muck out, but they’re dangerous if a horse is sick. Horses can lie down and breathe in that wood dust and never get it out of their systems.” I stopped short of telling him that foals can die from junk their moms eat or inhale. I’d told Spidells that when I worked there, but they wouldn’t listen.

  We exercised Gracie. I thought it would be fine to put Mason on her back since he’s as light as a saddle. But I didn’t want to do it without asking Madeline. And I didn’t feel like asking her.

  When Madeline left with Mason, M took off too.

  I escaped with a ride on Nickers before it got too dark. We cantered down my favorite country lane, and I imagined we were the only two creatures on earth. Sometimes I believe that if I could end every day like this, cantering with my horse on a country lane, nothing would ever go wrong.

  The rest of the night I got caught up on most of my homework. The only thing I skipped was some busywork for Pat Haven’s class, life science. She’d taken over for the real teacher, who had left to “find himself” before the first day of class. Usually Pat’s assignments were cool. I’d written about horses half a dozen times already. But this time she was making us look up the fancy names for animals and their classifications. Boring. Still, I would have done it if I hadn’t been so tied up with Gracie.

  Pat would understand.

  One great thing about winter is that nobody expects you to ride your bike to school. My bike is a backward bike, invented by my dad. You pedal backward to make it go forward. No matter how often I ride it, people don’t seem to get used to the sight.

  Sometimes Dad drops us off in the cattle truck, which gets almost as many stares as the back bike. But on Monday I set out on foot as early as Lizzy did.

  My sister has always had the reputation of being early to school—in Wyoming, through all the I states, and in Ashland Elementary. It was a reputation I’d never earned.

  But Monday I wanted to talk to Pat before classes started. I found her reading papers in her first-period classroom. I dragged a chair to her desk and told her all about my gift horse and the colt and what the vet had said. She listened so hard, her eyes narrowed to brown lines.

  “Two gift horses!” she exclaimed when I stopped for breath. “Hot dog! No offense. Reminds me of the time Mr. Haven, a fine horse trader himself, bought a Quarter Horse mare at the Ashland Auction. He set that mare in the pasture—your very pasture—that night. Next day we woke to two—mama and baby! The old horse trader who’d auctioned that mare got wind of what happened. He nearly had a cow himself! No offense. Tried to say he was hoodwinked! But folks knew better. That man of mine was the most honest soul on God’s green earth.”

  I pictured the horses in the pasture. We’d rented our house sight unseen from Pat Haven and were surprised to find the barn and pasture went with it. Even though her husband, the horse trader, died 10 years ago, the barn hadn’t needed much more than a good cleaning.

  Then I asked her what I’d really come to ask. “Pat, do you think the mare will be okay? And the foal?”

  She glanced at me sideways. “What’s your daddy say?”

  “That I should toss her to the animal-control people. Or let the vet handle it. At least he’s not making me do it.” I felt a sharp pang of longing for my barn. How was I ever going to make it through a whole day at school without checking on Gracie?

  Kids streamed into the room, bumping each other like wild Mustangs. A warning bell rang. Somebody laughed.

  “I reckon you ought to skedaddle to class, Winnie,” Pat said, getting up.

  I got up to leave . . . without the answer I’d come for. I tore down the hall. The last thing I needed was to be late to English again.

  “Walk please, Miss Willis!” hollered the principal.

  I walked, which made me three seconds late to Ms. Brumby’s room.

  Ms. Brumby was standing at the door, as if she’d known I’d be late. Her frizzy hair was pulled back with a navy hair ribbon that matched her long skirt and jacket, shoes and purse—as if it had snowed navy.

  I considered telling her I liked her black shoes, which of course were navy like everything else. But even I couldn’t do that to her. I leaned over to Barker and whispered, “What if Ms. Brumby woke up one morning color-blind? She’d never survive.”

  Barker chuckled, even though you could tell he tried not to. He’s way too nice to even think about people getting smitten with color blindness.

  “Attention, class!” Ms. Brumby commanded. She reminds me of the Brumby horse, a bony, Roman-nosed, Australian scrub horse. Makes me wonder how she got the name in the first place.

  Brian and a couple other kids in the popular herd were in the middle of an ink fight. They didn’t stop until Summer shushed them. Something was up.

  “This morning,” Ms. Brumby announced, crossing one navy high heel over the other as she leaned against her desk, “I have agreed to give your class president a few minutes to speak with you.”

  I turned to Barker. “Class president?”

  Barker shrugged. “Beats me.”

  Then Summer Spidell strode to the front like a queen on red carpet.

  “Who elected her president?” Kaylee whispered, wrinkling her tiny nose. Kaylee reminds me of another desert horse, totally different from the Brumby—the Akhal Teke, a small, compact horse with an elegant head. The Akhal Teke is fast, strong, and reliable. Although I don’t know Kaylee very well, I like her. She looks like she grew up in China, but her English is a hundred times better than mine.

  “Whatever happened to democracy?” I whispered back. Just like in Mustang herds, there’s always one dominant female who bosses everybody around.

  Ms. Brumby sat down, and Summer took over. “Some of you are disappointing me.” She actually stuck out her bottom lip in a pout. “Just look at this gorgeous paper you get the privilege of selling!” She held up the swatches of wrapping paper. “We’re doing the community a service! Who doesn’t need wrapping paper at Christmas?”

  I thought about raising my h
and, since we had plenty of comics in stock at our house. But I didn’t feel like explaining that to Summer.

  “I’ve already sold all 20 of my rolls and am well into my second set of 20.” Summer paused, as if expecting applause. “Grant sold 18.”

  “Go, Grant!” Brian yelled.

  I smiled at Grant, who, red-faced, smiled back. He’s not so bad. I wondered how his horse, Eager Star, was doing. Several months back I’d helped train the Quarter Horse for barrel races.

  “Anybody want to buy some of my wrapping paper?” Sal asked. Her red hair had a green streak in it that matched her green-striped sweater. Earrings climbed up both of her ears like silver steps.

  “Put me down for one!” Brian yelled, smiling at Sal. Brian is probably cute, if you can get past his personality.

  “That is so tight!” Sal exclaimed, reaching over and mussing Brian’s sandy blond hair. She turned to Summer. “Now you can’t accuse me of not selling anything.”

  “That’s fine,” Summer said, glaring at me. “Because some people haven’t sold even one piece of paper.”

  I met her glare until she looked away.

  Kaylee leaned over and said quietly, “That wrapping paper is so expensive! I wouldn’t dare ask my parents or grandparents to buy any.”

  “You said it! I haven’t even picked mine up yet,” I admitted.

  “I still don’t get why we have to sell this junk,” a guy next to Brian complained. Everybody calls him Flash, and I couldn’t remember his real name. “Why don’t we just buy our own Cedar Point tickets and go?”

  “You’ll have to talk to Ms. Brumby about that,” Summer said, glancing at our teacher.

  Ms. Brumby stood beside her desk. “I explained when I agreed to help sponsor the trip. We must impose hardship on no one. Affordable for all.”

  “Those tickets cost 30 or 40 dollars!” Kaylee whispered.

  “You’re kidding!” I said back. I knew they were expensive, so expensive that Lizzy and I had never even asked Dad about it. It would be fun to go there. Going with my class was probably the only way I’d get there too. Maybe I should at least try to sell some paper.