A Girl and Five Brave Horses

by Sonora Carver

  I was right in thinking that the title evidenced affection and pride, for he called me that in all the remaining years of our acquaintanceship, and because he liked it and because it seemed appropriate I called him “Daddy Carver.” Many people took me for his daughter and I never bothered to correct them, for I became a daughter to him through devotion, if not by right of blood.

  He had held off approval until I met the final test, afraid I might disappoint him somewhere along the way. I became convinced of this during the course of the next week when he started training a new girl for Al.

  When Al left, Dr. Carver promised to send him a trained rider in time for his opening in Texas, and to that end had put an ad in the paper. The first applicant appeared just before matinee time three days after my initial ride from the high tower, and I was present when Dr. Carver explained the act and asked her to stay for the performance so she could see for herself. After the show she said she would like to try and was told to report the next morning.

  For three mornings thereafter she was subjected to the same riding exercise I had undergone, but on the fourth Dr. Carver suddenly announced she was to make her first jump from the low tower.

  As I went up on the platform with her to show her how to stand, I was deeply ashamed. I had spent weeks learning to hang onto the horse, and here she was riding from the low tower after only three days of ground training. I was not only ashamed but also perplexed. She had not ridden the horse any better than I had. What, then, did this mean?

  The routine that followed after I came down from the tower was the same for her as it had been for me. The groom stopped the horse, she mounted, and after a brief pause the horse dived. I wasn’t enough of a rider yet to judge, but since she was still on the horse when he came up I assumed she had done pretty well. Then she went up for the second time and the horse was turned into the runway, but the groom didn’t release him after she had mounted. I could see that she was talking but could not hear what she was saying. From her gestures, however, I could tell that she was hesitating.

  At this point the conversation on the tower was interrupted by Dr. Carver, who shouted, “What’s going on there?” At that she threw both hands in the air, began screaming, and scrambled frantically over the horse’s rump and down the incline.

  I ran to the back of the tower. “What’s the matter?” I asked, but she shot past me, unheeding, and slammed into the dressing room. About this time Dr. Carver walked up. “What happened?” I said.

  “Nothing,” he answered in disgust. “She just hasn’t got the nerve.”

  “But,” I argued, “maybe if you’d given her more ground training—“

  ”No,” he said. “I haven’t time to waste on a girl without nerve, and after watching her the past three mornings I decided she didn’t have any. I let her ride from the tower just to be sure.”

  This, then, was the test. There had to be several along the way, and she had just flunked hers.

  After we found someone to ride for Al, which we did the following week, we trained her and sent her off to Texas, and then there was nothing on our calendar except two daily performances. I passed the morning hours by practicing on the trap bar AI had put up for me before he left and by swimming in the tank. I was forbidden to swim in the big pool in the amusement park because Dr. Carver said that I shouldn’t mix with my audience for the same reason I shouldn’t mix with the people who worked in the park. “Familiarity breeds contempt,” he said. “They’ve got to think you’re special.”

  Thus I was forced into a close and isolated association with Dr. Carver. His influence was to prove to be both wide and deep, endowed with a creeping quality much like inflation. He influenced not only my deportment but also the length of my hair. I found to my astonishment that I was letting it grow!

  In 1920 when I had cut my hair there were still precious few bobs in the South. Most women put their hair up or back but did not cut it. One day when I was sixteen I spent the afternoon with a friend, during the course of which we washed our hair. After the shampoo came the brushing and putting-up ritual, which always seemed to take hours. When I could not get my locks to stay in place because the pins kept sliding out, I suddenly reached for the scissors lying on Mamie Lou’s dresser and hacked off my hair.

  Within a minute it lay in a pile of red-brown glory, hair I had had since the day of my birth. There was silence, as well there might have been. I sat there looking at it, thinking, “Mother is going to kill me.” Then I got up, pinned back what was left, and started to go home. I slipped in the back door and fled down the hall to the room I shared with Jac. When she came in later I buried my head in the pillow and pretended to be asleep.

  The next morning I asked her to bring me the paper, planning to hide behind it and for a few minutes forestall the inevitable. I had hardly assumed a reading pose when I heard Mother coming down the hall. She threw open the door, stormed into the room, and snatched the paper out of my hands. Pointing to my head, she shouted, “I know!”

  My little brother had seen me slinking home the night before and had made an announcement at breakfast. The upshot was that I was told to stay in the house until my hair grew long again. Such an order was out of the question, of course, and had to be rescinded, but for a long time Mother never looked at my shorn head without a disapproving and tormented sigh.

  I took pride in my achievement and clung stubbornly to my bobbed hair. The fact was I liked it short. But in Durham I found myself with lengthening hair. Dr. Carver accomplished this by uncanny means. He said one day that he was pleased to see I was keeping my promise and letting my hair grow. I could not remember such a promise and I told him so. “Of course you did,” he said firmly. So, on the basis of a statement that had no foundation in fact and certainly none in logic, Dr. Carver succeeded where my mother had failed.

  Having won the victory with regard to my hair, he started in on my clothes. Women’s dresses were beginning to creep up about that time and had reached a point three inches beneath the kneecap. This was shocking to Dr. Carver, who insisted that a “lady” never let her knees show, so whenever I went to buy a dress he came with me to make certain I got it long enough. If it didn’t meet his standards he had it let down, and I ended up wearing hems about three or four inches longer than was fashionable.

  On occasion I felt the old upward surge of defiance that was as much a part of me as my hands and feet, but I squashed it by asking myself, “What difference does it make? If it makes him happy, let him have his way.”

  My moments of antagonism were further salved by the fact that at least he was consistent. He was as strict with himself as he was with me and as conservative in his tastes. How it had happened that the flamboyant days of his youth had given way to such conservatism, I do not know. All I know is that his former love for the spectacular in clothing was now confined to a love for red, which he exhibited only in his ties.

  However, he liked good clothes and paid a lot for them and took care of everything but his hats. These he sat on, crushed, abused, and, what was worse, wore no matter how they looked. He had only one for which he showed any reverence, though I never found out why. It was a white panama which he saved for special occasions.

  In addition to conservative habits in dress, he never smoked or drank. In fact, he had never done either, even back in the old days, when to set a saloon door swinging was the hallmark of manhood. This was such a novelty that in time he became famous for his abstinence, and once when he was in St. Louis giving a shooting exhibition a group of women from the Women’s Christian Temperance Union appeared and asked him to give public testimony to the fact that the reason he was so big and strong was that he never drank.

  Dr. Carver refused. “I don’t know that’s why,” he said. “Look at Buffalo Bill. He’s just as big and strong and healthy as I am and he hasn’t drawn a sober breath since I’ve known him. And that’s been a long, long time.”

  His only vice was mild profanity. Life on the plains hadn’t be
en designed to promote delicate speech, and his was not. The words were never foul, merely vigorous and forceful. They were also usually forgivable because he never realized he had used them. Once when I accused him of cursing he looked at me very hurt and said, “I never curse.”

  Where my language was concerned he would not permit even the mildest slang. “Gosh” and “golly” were not at all to his liking, nor “gee,” “dern,” or “darn.” One day I thought I had found one that would surely get by without violating Dr. Carver’s code. I had read it in the paper and anxiously awaited my chance to use it. It finally came one evening when we were sitting on the front porch of the boarding-house, talking to some people. Someone made a flat statement and I said, “Banana oil!”

  Immediately Dr. Carver turned to me. “Haven’t I told you never to use such language?” “Well,” I said, “what in the world can I say?” He replied, “You may say, ‘Oh, my word.’” It occurred to me later that perhaps he wanted me to stay apart from other people not so much to provide an air of mystery as to keep me with him to see to his comforts. If this was so, it was too late by the time I caught on. I was too fond of him and too proud of his pride in me to take an independent stand.

  That first summer was memorable principally for working with three of the horses. Lightning and John had gone off with Al and the new rider, but we kept Klatawah, Judas, and Snow.

  Klatawah’s name was Indian, meaning either “Go to hell” or “Go away,” depending on the inflection. He was a chestnut sorrel gelding weighing about 1250 pounds, and his conformation was perfect. From stories I had heard, he had apparently been quite a devil in his younger days, but when I knew him he had settled down, which is not to say that he didn’t have plenty of spirit; and he was the greatest showman of all the diving horses I have ever known.

  He reminded me of a temperamental Shakespearean actor, the only difference being that a Shakespearean actor loves an intelligent audience and Klatawah loved a big one. His manner when working for a small crowd was so different as to make him seem two horses instead of one. When the crowd was small his whole body and every action seemed to radiate disgust. A person could almost feel his thoughts— “To think that I, Klatawah, the great diving horse—a star!—should be forced to work for such a miserable handful of people.”

  At such times he would flop over against the right side of the tower in a sort of reclining position, and instead of counting out his age vigorously at the edge of the platform, he would give vent to his disgust by making a few lazy scrapes at the pad, as if wiping his foot on a door mat. Then, more often than not, he would take off without bothering to straighten out of that absurd half-reclining position. This was hard on the rider, since it invariably caused a friction burn anywhere from the ankle to the knee, and I was forced finally to wear elastic ankle and knee bands to protect myself when I rode him.

  Klatawah’s style was the extreme plunge, which, according to definitions propounded by Dr. Carver, meant that when he took off he exerted the greatest pressure with his forelegs. This sent his body out in a lunging motion that was not as beautiful to watch as other diving styles, but Klatawah could make it spectacular because he worked with such fire.

  The instant he realized the crowd was large he would begin to prance. Up would go the ears, and the beautiful arch in his neck would become more pronounced. When he worked like this the crowd always applauded with extra enthusiasm, and he loved the applause. In fact, as I was to learn later, he seemed actually to be jealous when another act got applause. Once while we were appearing in Atlantic City it was customary to bring the horses from their stables and keep them backstage until time for the dive. When the audience applauded an act working out front, the applause could be heard backstage. Klatawah would lift his head high in the air, listen intently, and then whinny, as if to say, “Just be patient. I’ll be there.”

  The other types of dives horses made were the medium plunge, in which equal pressure is exerted with all four feet, a very graceful dive to witness; and the nose dive, which occurs when the horse exerts the greatest pressure with his hind feet. This last dive is not only very beautiful but also the most spectacular and by far the most difficult to ride.

  In all three dives the horse enters the water head down and forelegs extended, but in the nose dive the horse enters the water with his whole body in an absolutely vertical position, while in the other two styles the body goes in at an angle. The extreme plunge was by far the easiest to ride, which was the reason I had learned on Klatawah.

  There was more to Klatawah, however, than mere showmanship. He was utterly dependable and, aside from a real intelligence, had an endearing sense of duty. He first demonstrated this to me one day shortly after I had started diving from the high platform.

  It was discovered just before performance time that the ground near the front of the tank had mired. When the workmen were preparing it they had scooped too much soil away from the incline and then back-filled with soft dirt to make up for their mistake. After a few days the slow seepage of water through the tarpaulin had turned the incline into a quagmire. Since this made it difficult for the horse to climb out, especially when burdened with a rider, Dr. Carver told me to dismount once we were in the water and let Klatawah swim out alone.

  Ordinarily I would never have dismounted, since the mark of an expert rider is the one who stays with her horse, but that night as Klatawah surfaced I immediately let go and slipped off his back. When he started swimming he realized I was not on his back and turned and circled the tank, looking for me. He swam up beside me and gave me a look that clearly said, “You poor thing. Fell off, did you? Well, get back on. We’ve got to do this thing right, you know.”

  When I still did not mount but continued to do my own swimming he gave me another look which seemed to say, “Well, if that’s the way you feel about it,” and headed for the incline.

  It would have been a different story with Judas. Judas, the horse I rode alternately with Klatawah, was, to put it bluntly, a horse of a different color. Had I slipped off his back while in the tank it is likely he would have gone off and let me drown. Not that he was malicious; he simply didn’t care. For Judas it was every man for himself.

  He was a white horse with roan ears and roan spots on his body. He had been given his name by a performer who was riding him on the practice lot one day when he threw her off over his head. “That horse is a Judas!” she had said, and Dr. Carver, overhearing, had seized on the name. He said that since he had one biblical character in the troupe—John the Baptist—he might as well have another.

  Judas’ personality contained more complex qualities than this streak of unreliability. Like many horses, he had an abundance of curiosity, and his was not only unusually strong but of a peculiar quality. It was the impersonal curiosity of a bystander, so completely cold-blooded that I had the feeling he would have stood by and watched any crime without turning a hair. Furthermore, his curiosity was so compelling that in his stall he never stood to eat his hay but after getting a mouthful would walk to the door and hang his head out. A lot of hay usually fell out of his mouth, and frequently as much as a third of his meal would end up outside on the ground, but Judas’ philosophy seemed to be that he would rather satisfy his curiosity than his stomach. Later I became convinced that this animal was also capable of chagrin.

  One day when he and Klatawah were out grazing in the pasture adjoining the tower I saw George going out to bring them back to the barn. It must have been a day when Judas was feeling unusually perverse, because the groom had no sooner led the two horses up to the barn than Judas suddenly cut to one side. The groom made a wild grab at his halter, but it was too late. Judas was off and away, and there was nothing for the groom to do but put Klatawah in his stall and then go back to get Judas.

  By this time Judas must have decided to play a game. He stood perfectly still until the groom got close enough to reach his halter, then he threw back his head and took off. This happened four times, and each
time the groom almost caught him. The fifth time, just as Judas jerked his head up, his hind feet skidded in a wet place on the lot and his hoofs dug a trench in a semicircle. In a half-up, half-down position he sat for a moment, then got up and with a completely crest-fallen appearance trotted back to the barn without the groom so much as laying a hand on him. George told me later that Judas went immediately to his stall and walked back to the farthest corner, where he stood with his face to the wall for the rest of the day.

  Judas was a fair-to-middling diver, but he acquired a habit which, as time went on, developed beyond harmless eccentricity. Instead of standing on the floor of the tower to look the crowd over, he would drop down into position for the kickoff and simply hang there. At this point the strain on the arms and legs of the rider is severe, and the first few times he pulled this stunt my muscles felt as if they would relax in spite of me and that I would go off over his head. Finally one day I stretched my feet back to the padding on the tower and hooked my toes over the edge and, thus bracing myself, found I could remain on the edge just as long as he could.

  While he hung there he seemed to be debating the merits of an extreme versus a medium plunge. Later, after many such indecisive poses, Judas invented a variation; he began to twist his body in mid-air after he took off and corkscrewed his way down, a trick that caused him to strike the water crosswise rather than toward the front of the tank. No one could guess what went on in his mind, but the maneuver seemed deliberate, since it took a great deal more physical effort to dive that complicated way. Deliberate or not, it held possibilities of real danger; he might hit the side of the tank or unseat the rider in mid-air. When we could not break him of his new habit, Dr. Carver reluctantly decided he must sell Judas.

  He always hated to sell any of the horses, because he loved them in spite of their faults, but in Judas’ case there seemed nothing else to do. The next step was to break him to the bridle and reins before seeking out prospective buyers. Each morning thereafter when Klatawah was taken to the parking lot to be exercised I went along on Judas to ride him back and forth.