A Girl and Five Brave Horses

by Sonora Carver

  A Girl and Five Brave Horses

  By Sonora Carver

  As Told To Elizabeth Land

  Dancing Unicorn Books

  Cover Image © Can Stock Photo Inc. / mariait

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN: 978-1-5154-0811-6

  To Al

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  One

  As I sat in the grandstand at the fairgrounds that night in 1923 I had no idea that less than a year from that time I would be performing the act I was about to witness. Nothing in my background had prepared me to expect it, nor had any personal inclination led me toward it, and yet what was about to happen was to change my entire life.

  In front of the grandstand was a broad green stretch of ground on which different kinds of equipment—high wires, trapezes, and the like—had been set up for various acts. But by far the most impressive was a tall tower that stood to the left. It was freshly painted white and so enormous it dwarfed everything else in sight.

  A girl in a red bathing suit, brown football helmet, and white sneakers sat on a railing at the top of the tower, looking intently down a steep ramp. In a moment she gave a signal with her hand and instantly there came the sound of a horse’s hoofs hitting the runway. Streamers of lights on the tower quivered and braces and supports vibrated as the horse galloped up, and then, as if by magic, the horse’s forequarters appeared. She came off the ramp onto an aisle that led to the front of the tower, and as she galloped past the girl on the railing the girl jumped on.

  They drew up together at the head of the platform, where there was a sheer drop-off, and the horse stood for a moment like a beautiful statue, looking down at the audience in the grandstand and at a tank of water that lay in front of the tower.

  To my everlasting memory I saw she was dapple-gray, her forequarters wholly white, her flanks heavily marbled with gray. She had a white mane, which was flung to one side, and a white tail like a plume to the flow, and she looked as proud as any duchess, yet full of strength and power. I might have guessed, had I not already known, that her name was the Duchess of Lightning.

  I, who had loved horses since I was old enough to know what they were, was completely spellbound. I thought she was the most beautiful animal I had ever seen in my life or was ever likely to see.

  After looking the crowd over to her satisfaction she slid her forefeet down. A series of planks, set one beside the other, was nailed flat to the front of the platform, and it was here she braced herself. She hung for a moment at an almost perpendicular angle, then pushed away from the boards and lunged outward into space. For a split second her form was imprinted on the night sky like a silhouette, then her beautiful body arched gracefully over and down and plunged into the tank.

  Sheets of water splashed up, hung there bright and crystal-edged, then fell back into the tank, writhing and boiling in the place where they had disappeared. For a moment nothing happened, and then the horse shot up, rocketed from the bottom by her own impetus, but as if catapulted.

  The girl was still on her back. The horse swam toward the front of the tank and I noticed her ferocious expression. Her nostrils were sucked in and her teeth were bared, and for a moment I was frightened. Then I realized that nothing was wrong; it was just her way of keeping the water out. After a moment she reached an incline at the front of the tank and cantered out onto dry ground, where the rider slipped off her back.

  By this time everyone was clapping and some were shouting and stamping. It was obvious that everyone was as thrilled as I was.

  I turned to my date sitting next to me. “Would you do that?” I asked.

  He said, “Do you think I’m crazy!”

  It was a common enough answer and a sensible one, too, but it had special meaning for me because I had said almost the same thing to my mother three days before. She had come to my room at the boardinghouse on one of her odder missions; she wanted me to go with her to the Savannah Hotel to see the people who were presenting the diving-horse act at the fair.

  “Why should I want to meet them?” I asked in astonishment.

  “Because they’re looking for someone to dive the horses, and you’d be perfect for it.”

  “Me!” I said. “Dive on a horse? Mother, you’ve lost your mind!”

  “No,” she said, “I haven’t. You’ve got all the qualifications.” And as if to prove it, she handed me a want ad. She had torn it from the paper and the edges were all jagged.

  Wanted: Attractive young woman who can swim and dive. Likes horses, desires to travel. See Dr. W. F. Carver, Savannah Hotel.

  I handed it back to her with the words, “I’m not interested.”

  “But don’t you see? It offers everything you’ve ever wanted! And you’ve got all the qualifications!”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “I’m not interested. Traveling around with a carnival!”

  “It’s not a carnival,” she insisted. “They travel by themselves. And what’s more, it’s one of the finest acts in the country. Everybody says so.”

  “I don’t care,” I repeated. “I’m not interested. I don’t want to meet them.” And the more she argued, the more resistant I became, which is understandable only if you knew Mother.

  With Mother a person had to be stubborn to stay sane. Mother hadn’t a shred of practicality and was as irresponsible as a cockroach. Completely lacking in organization, she could not be depended on for anything. A person might have called her an eccentric, but of a definite type. She was an undercover eccentric because her eccentricities didn’t show. She didn’t wear a spider in her hair or an old Confederate overcoat or get up in the night and beat on a frying pan. On the contrary, her eccentricities were hidden beneath a veil of normality, and you had to live with Mother to know. If you did you were sure.

  “Now look,” I said, “I’m not going down to the hotel with you and that’s all there is to it.”

  “But I told them I’d bring you.”

  “Then you’ll have to tell them you were mistaken.”

  “You’re passing up the chance of a lifetime.”

  “I don’t think so,” I replied.

  That’s the way it began, just as simple as that, the way so many things in life begin and end up having the impact of King Kong. For me the most world-shaking event in my life began with nothing more than a mild-mannered want ad read by my mother, for the upshot of the matter was that she wouldn’t quit talking about it that day or the next, so that finally I relented. I’d go to the hotel with her, I said, if she’d promise to leave me alone.

  It was a Wednesday evening and they were all in the hotel lobby—Dr. Carver, his son Allen, a daughter Lorena, and Vivian, a girl who rode for them. Dr. Carver was, I found, the most distinguished-looking man I had ever met. I didn’t admit this to Mother then or later, but I was quite impressed. He was eighty-four years old at the time but didn’t look it. He stood tall and straight like a redwood and was apparently as indestructible. His complexion was ruddy, with a series of ridges stamped between his remarkably penetrating eyes. As we talked about the act and the possibility of my joining it, I had the feeling he could see the bones in
my skull.

  Although he did offer me the job with his company I turned him down, explaining politely that I didn’t think it was what I wanted to do and that I had really come along only to placate my mother. I don’t remember my exact words, but that was the gist of it, and if I remember correctly he smiled and said something like, “I understand,” and after that we left.

  Meeting Dr. Carver, however, stimulated my interest if not my appetite, and I was more anxious to see the act than I had been before. Hence I’d gone to the fair with my date and seen the show in which the diving-horse act was the finale. After I had watched the magnificent dapple-gray horse my whole outlook changed. As emphatically as I had not wished to learn to ride a diving horse, I now wished to learn. The fact was that I had fallen in love, simply and completely.

  To understand how I felt about horses one should know that when I was only five years old I tried to trade my brother for a horse. When H.S. was six weeks old I willingly would have traded him for a bay named Sam had my parents not objected.

  Sam was the carriage horse of the woman who lived next door, and she knew I loved him as I loved nothing else in the world. One day, as a joke, she asked me if I’d trade. I knew good and well I could get a new baby brother practically any time, but a horse! A horse was something else. Would I trade? Of course I would! I raced into the house, snatched H.S. out of his crib, and tore back out with him, afraid that if I didn’t hurry she’d change her mind. Just as I was about to hand him over, however, I had the feeling that someone was watching and, when I turned, there were my mother and father standing on the back porch.

  I don’t think I have ever had a sicker feeling. I knew instantly they didn’t want me to trade and nearly burst out crying. As it was, I managed to say, “I’m sorry. I can’t.” I took him back inside and put him in his bed, literally bursting with grief.

  This love of horses was to remain with me for the rest of my life and to lead me into strange acts, some of them nearly catastrophic.

  The year I started school I discovered a penful of horses down at the railroad yards. Waycross, Georgia, was a stop-ping-off place for feeding and watering livestock on their way to tie stockyards. Of course they were mostly cattle, but there were some horses, too, and after I found they could be seen every morning I stopped each day on my way to school. As a result I was chronically tardy but I never mended my ways. Even when the teacher threatened to fail me I continued to come in late. I had no use for the first grade and, to make matters worse, entered the room with a savoir-faire that would have felled Sinatra. In the end, however, the teacher had the last word. She flunked me.

  That should have taught me a lesson, but I refused to be taught. I carried my truancy with me right on up through high school. As late as the tenth grade I was cutting classes to go horseback riding and once nearly killed our principal. He had the poor sense to cut back through the city park on his way from watching baseball practice and was following the bridle path when I came bouncing along. I pulled aside in time to avoid running him down but not in time to avoid being spotted. The next morning I was called into his office and threatened with expulsion if I cut school again.

  He needn’t have worried. I quit—not because of a horse, however. My school career ended when my mother was called away to be with Grandfather, who was ill, and left me to take care of the children. She hadn’t meant for me to stay home, but that is what I did. The real reason was that I had fallen in love and had been rejected. A rejected eighteen-year-old is like a runaway torpedo. There’s no telling what she will do or in which direction she’ll go. For me it was the next thing to being thrown from a horse, and I simply couldn’t bear it, so I minded the children and stayed out of sight of my classmates.

  To reveal the plain foolhardiness of my action, it is necessary to say that the love affair had gone no deeper than a few soulful looks and a couple of Saturday-night movies, but pride is a woeful thing, powerfully strong in me.

  How often I’ve regretted it, it would be impossible to say. The real sorrow is that in spite of everything I had always made good grades, and had I really tried I might have become a student. But there I was out of school, and after a while I went to work. Before this happened, however, Mother moved herself and my five brothers and sisters to Savannah, Georgia. It was an ad that hooked her.

  For Sale: Two acres on Burnside River, fifteen miles from Savannah. Five-room stucco cottage, modern conveniences, two-car garage, boathouse, private pier, six rowboats. Cash or terms.

  Mother was addicted to ads. She read them with the avidity of a bird watcher watching a bird, and as a result made some marvelous purchases. Once it was a covey of fish bowls which she set about the house, not because we had a lot of goldfish, but because the bowls were on sale. Another time it was an office building which she converted into a boardinghouse. Very few people have bedded down in former chiropractic treatment rooms, but her boarders did. Another time she made cosmetics at home to sell to the neighbors. For quite a while after she read that ad we had pestles and mortars around with mysterious mixtures ground up in them and non-edible messes bubbling on the stove.

  Mother was clever and could have been quite successful at almost anything if it hadn’t been that, once she got a project going, she completely lost interest. She had a mind like a dragonfly, restless and always on the move, and sometimes we moved too. During the years of my growing up it was difficult for me to count the number of houses we had lived in. She would see an ad for a house to rent and decide it had more closet space than ours. In a twinkling we’d find ourselves lugging our belongings halfway across town.

  Sometimes, however, she moved without even telling us. One day we came home from school and there wasn’t a stick of furniture in the house. A man was sweeping up and told us we had moved, and he also told us where. When we got there we found Mother unpacking dishes. She said yes, we’d moved. So the shift to Savannah was no surprise to me, although I was visiting an aunt in Florida at the time and had had no idea that Mother was thinking of moving. But then, neither had she. Only when she read the want ad had the seizure hit her and she had been struck with the idea of buying the stucco cottage and making a lodge out of it for hunters. She planned to rent rooms to them and give them early-morning breakfast before they went out to hunt. She didn’t say any of this in the letter to me, though. She just wrote, “When you come back, don’t go to Bainbridge. We don’t live there any more.”

  I was old enough then to have impeded her had I been home, but by the time I got to Savannah it was clearly too late. All the children were out splashing around in the river and everyone was happy. The boathouse proved to be nothing more than a shed, and the fleet of six boats had been whittled down to one buckled and spavined specimen. What was more, the house was so small she couldn’t possibly have rented any rooms. There were seven of us and only five rooms any way you counted them.

  For my part, after my first trip to town—a five-mile walk to the trolley line, followed by a forty-minute ride—I made up my mind to rent a room in town and get myself a job. Until then the children had been too small for me to leave them, but they would all be in school that fall and I could get out and view the world, which I’d been straining to see ever since I was two years old.

  I remember that time quite clearly because it was my running-away period. At least Mother called it “running away.” I knew perfectly well that I was coming back. Apparently she wasn’t so sure, because after a series of “runaways” she began to lock me in the back yard in order to keep me at home. I soon learned to climb the fence and take off. The situation finally became so critical, she adopted the suggestion of a friend. She put a flour sack over my head and tied it down with string.

  The theory behind this was that I’d be so ashamed to be seen looking that way that I’d automatically stay home. However, she reckoned without the determination which came in so handy later. The first time she tried it she found me about an hour later two blocks away playing with some children
who, apparently having satisfied themselves that there was a head under the sack, welcomed me into their games.

  In all fairness to the plan it should be said that the child was not expected to suffocate. The sacks had been washed and were sleazy enough to be breathed through and seen through without difficulty.

  From what has been said it should be apparent that, for all Mother’s whimsicalities, she was not entirely mistaken when she thought of me in connection with Dr. Carver’s ad. As a matter of fact, she had every good reason to believe I’d make an excellent performer. I was young (nineteen), I was attractive (people said so), and I liked to travel (even with sacks on my head). I did love horses (H.S. was still with us but had had a narrow escape) and I could swim and dive.

  The night I went home after seeing the act I told Jac, my younger sister, who was living with me and going to school in Savannah, that I had changed my mind. “I want to learn to ride the diving horses,” I said. “I’m going to take the job.”

  “Well, you’d better hurry,” she said. “They’re leaving tomorrow.”

  There was a paper lying on the bedroom floor and she pointed to it. I picked it up and read a headline on an inside page.

  “CARVER HIGH-DIVING HORSE ACT MOST SUCCESSFUL AT FAIR,” and beneath it, “Dr. Carver carved place in old West.”

  It was a full-page write-up about him and his diving horses, intended to boost attendance at the fair. For me it served the purpose of introducing him to me more thoroughly than anything else could have.

  According to the write-up, Dr. Carver had been part of the old West when the West was really wild. Back in the middle 1800s he had acted as scout for a regiment of cavalry stationed near the site of North Platte, Nebraska, although North Platte wasn’t yet there. Along with the scouting, he had hunted and trapped and was one of the first men to file papers for a homestead in Frontier County, Nebraska. He might have settled there, he was quoted as saying, had it not been that about that time the commercial demand for leather became so great that anybody who was a good rifleshot got busy killing buffalo. He had seen the time when the skinned carcasses lay so close to one another that a man could walk for miles without touching the ground, just stepping from one body to another. He said that now he regretted the waste of all that meat and the suffering it had caused the Indians by taking their main source of food, but that in those days he had been too young to feel any sense of shame. He was only in his late teens and busy getting rich. Also, he was becoming a deadly shot with a rifle; so deadly, in fact, that he could shoot out the eye of a buffalo while riding at full gallop. The Indians were so frightened of him that they gave him the name of “Evil Spirit.”