Barn Blind

by Jane Smiley

  “Spanky is a lovely horse,” she said. “I trained him myself.” On the whole, Kate did not feel that she cheated these men. The horses she sold were worth but a few hundred dollars less than she charged. Certainly they were sound and well trained, and these fathers paid not just for the horses but for the reliability they found in Kate herself and the safety of her equestrian theories. You had only to look around the room to note the impeccable taste of her well-bred establishment, where one found the ambiance of Maryland, and no worrisome male stablehands. “And Ellen has been doing quite well on him. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few ribbons came her way.” Ellen smiled, as she was expected to, and then regarded the loop of her whip very intently. She did not want Spanky for mere ribbons. She wanted him because she loved him. Kate quoted a sum. Her voice was precise and mellifluous, so that there would be no confusion about numbers or decimal points. The father repeated the sum, and the daughter, hearing a polite doubtful tone she knew well, and also hearing a figure a good deal larger than the one she had proposed as an estimate at the dinner table, sat up in her chair, but was unable to look at her father. More clarification was unnecessary. Here was an expenditure that could not fail to bob to the surface in family disagreements. The aftertones of Kate’s voice reverberated perfectly between father and daughter, and Ellen pursed her lips. To persist in her desire now took courage. “Well,” said Mr. Eisen, “I suppose we’ve gone too far to turn back, haven’t we, Ellen?”

  Ellen shrugged.

  “Ellen is very fond of Spanky, I know,” said Kate.

  “I’m sure she is,” said Mr. Eisen. “Why don’t I speak to Ellen’s mother about it and give you a call?” Promises about room cleaning and dishwashing would be exacted.

  Kate nodded. “Of course. Perfectly all right.” She fished in the coffee-table drawer for a business card and considered the sum of money. It was enough for Spanky, but not enough for the farm.

  No matter how many fathers there were, the sums were never enough for the farm. Although Axel contributed his salary and the dividends of his investments, although there was a monthly revenue from students and a few equine boarders, and though Kate had a minuscule annual income, there was never enough for the upkeep of more than forty horses, four children, two adults, numerous large and small pieces of machinery, five buildings, miles of fencing, and three hundred acres of topsoil. Gates were tied shut with baling twine. Clothing, always bought on sale, passed, whether it fit or not, from one child to the next. With the veterinarian there was a standing debt, as well as with the blacksmith, and the children had more than once been told that rice pudding, if made with plenty of milk and raisins and sweetened with brown sugar, was nutritious enough for anyone’s dinner. Kate, whose conviction of her own business acumen was lifelong, marveled that other, more poorly guided families could afford anything at all in these times of expense and inflation.

  “Let me offer you some coffee, or better still, iced tea,” she said. She led Mr. Eisen and Ellen into the kitchen. While they were sitting at the table, a number of boys, who Mr. Eisen assumed were her sons, tramped through. One stopped for milk at the refrigerator. Another, the tallest, was handsome, and resembled Kate, until you looked back again and saw that something indefinable in her created something missing in him. Her skin and hair were dry and uncared for, but her eyes had the glittery, splintery look of shattered mirrors. She was talking. Somehow, they had gotten onto the subject of miracles. Ellen fidgeted. Mr. Eisen sent her out, then said, “Excuse me, I didn’t hear you?”

  Kate nodded cordially. “I was telling you about the miracle I was party to a few years ago. Longer than a few, actually.” She smiled beatifically upon the boy at the refrigerator, who scowled and stomped after the others. “When John was born I was told that I simply had to walk every day for at least an hour. The birth, you see, was especially difficult, and my doctor was of the active rather than the invalid school.” Mr. Eisen could hear a voice in the living room say, “Here we go again. You’d think I was to blame for the whole thing.”

  Kate was continuing. “There was a lovely mare boarding here at the time, a pet, actually, of a friend of mine, who had been a splendid event horse, but was foundered. Founder is a disease of the laminae inside the horny part of the horse’s hoof. They swell against the shell of the hoof and cause the horse a lot of pain. I wanted Mildred to put the horse down, which is, of course, what is done with most foundered animals.” Mr. Eisen blanched, thinking of such a profitless end to such a large investment. “It’s purely a matter of carelessness, and no horse living on this place has ever foundered. Anyway, this mare was turned out with the broodstock in the far pasture, and I would walk there, rain or shine, every day, because I liked to check the horses, and it took exactly an hour.”

  “She’s still at it!” exclaimed the voice from the living room, and the door slammed.

  Kate appeared not to have noticed. “I begged and begged Mildred to have the horse destroyed. The poor thing was in tremendous pain. One day (I was thinking about this the day before yesterday because it was just about this time of year) I was taking my walk in the rain. I got caught in that pasture when a sudden thunderstorm came up, and I was standing in a hollow near an old outbuilding, watching the mares. Mildred’s horse was off by herself a ways, by the fence. Often an injured animal will be excluded from the group, especially in any sort of crisis, even the crisis of a thunderstorm.” Mr. Eisen nodded, as if this was a bit of homely wisdom that could be applied in many circumstances, but actually he was thinking how profound this silly story sounded floating in the liquid of Kate’s voice. “And then, just when I was thinking about John and how mad he would be if I missed his feeding, because I’ve always breastfed well into the second year, and he was the most demanding of all” (there was a thump and a cry from the living room) “there came an incredible boom and flash, and the mare was struck down, the fencepost beside her was scorched, and all the broodstock began galloping toward the woods. Killed! Right before my eyes. It seemed like a miracle to me, it really did. God spoke to me about the proper kindness to animals, and I felt it. Well, and this is really true, when I got back to the house, there was of all things a priest at the door, with some story about his car and a puddle, and we got to talking, and it changed my life.”

  An obscure ardor made itself felt inside Herbert Eisen, and though he didn’t for a moment believe in the miraculous nature of this event, he found himself vividly noticing Kate’s white teeth and bony shoulders and strangely bent arm. “How fascinating!” he said, and thought that he sounded convincing. Kate was shaking her head in fifteen-year-old wonder. “Oh dear,” she said, “the children say that I embarrass them with these stories, but a miracle is a miracle, isn’t it?” Mr. Eisen nodded. “Bless you,” she went on, and suddenly he knew that, if she did believe in the children’s embarrassment, it would mean nothing to her. A very interesting woman, he thought, full of integrity. And something else too (he looked at her eyes again) but something he could not define.

  The argument ranged throughout the house. He pursued her from the dinner table, asserting, “I won’t. I won’t. I won’t.” When she went into the bathroom, he stood outside shouting “No!” and she was forced to be autocratic when she wanted to be alone. And then, when she caved in to the indignity of saying something through the door, he replied, “I can’t hear you!”

  The subject was a horse named Teddy that Kate wished John to ride in place of Freeway. Teddy, otherwise known as The Train, was one of the best-coordinated and best-schooled mounts on the place. He also happened to be lazy, stubborn, and ugly. All things considered, he was the only horse capable of taking John through the summer’s equestrian work—those young enough were not enough schooled, and those sufficiently developed were either already spoken for or too old. Considering the jerk she had seen John give Freeway’s mouth, Kate was not dismayed by the punitive element in things as they turned out, but had she had another horse, she would certainly have considered mou
nting the boy otherwise. However, she didn’t.

  “You do!” contradicted John as she opened the bathroom door, and she was startled by the look he gave her, not a child’s look at all, but the wide-open, contemptuous look of an angry adult. She realized at once, perhaps for the first time, that his eyes were of a height with hers. Then he veiled himself in customary respect, and she felt in herself the memory of this politic attitude. In the midst of the loudest contradictions of one’s parent, one was careful to insert an undertone of self-doubt, of entreaty, that ceded power to the parent. “Why can’t I ride Chips?” he demanded. “He needs the work. So does Treasure. You don’t have to breed her this year. Half the horses on this place don’t get ridden anyway. Lambert Smith said last year that we’ve got so much good horseflesh around here that we have to let it go because we can’t take proper care of everything. I could ride Bingo or Jolly!” Recognition of herself in him did not render her any less positive that his greatest equestrian (and apparently personal) growth would result from conflict with Teddy.

  “Only babies ride him! He’s a beginner’s horse!”

  “Teddy is a horse who has been called to many positions in life. Mary Rogers rode him on the B team that went to the national rally.”

  “Five years ago! He’s older than I am!”

  “Which is old neither for horse nor man.”

  “He’s stupid.”

  “Right. That’s why he succeeds better than any horse on this place in doing exactly what he wants, no matter who the rider is.”

  “He’s ugly.”

  “If you take blues with him, everyone will just say how cute he is.”

  “I won’t.”

  “What?”

  “I won’t do anything! Nothing! I won’t even get up tomorrow.”

  Knowing she had momentarily retrieved the child out of the man, Kate turned and allowed Axel to say as he walked by, “Time for bed, John.”

  “Agh!” John jumped at her, putting his face right next to hers and grimacing frightfully.

  “Go to bed!” she yelled, and, recognizing the note of true anger in her voice, he did as he was told.

  Kate was reserved with her husband, and practically never spoke to him in their nightly half hour alone together. As a rule she contemplated her own schemes. Often she read The Chronicle of the Horse, watching for names she knew, trying to damp down suspicion of names she didn’t know, and wishing, occasionally, that she had the money and the time to send her horses out East, where the Team was, and where the proper arena for equestrian skill would always be, in spite of California and Chicago. She forgot Axel’s youthful presence, except to feel ill at ease if he seemed about to jump up and prowl around. He was a man without substance to her: underweight, without religion, as ready, it seemed, to run or skip or fall down as a child. These reading projects he undertook (the latest was someone named Oscar Spangler or Spengler) were to her the emblem of his nature. Every time she happened to notice, he was beginning something new.

  Tonight, however, she was somehow set in motion by the argument with John, and she wanted to speak. There was an undesired momentous quality about breaking the silence. Axel sat casually in the chintz wing chair, frosted with lamplight, his right arm arched over his head like the branch of a tree, his left hand spread across the book. While he read he made noises—little coughs or hums, and sometimes the pronunciation of a word (not always difficult ones, either; as she watched, he muttered “body”). He was as without dignity this evening as ever, and his boyishness touched her as little, though she liked his thick blond hair. Still, she wanted without preamble, without a preliminary and unnatural attraction of his attention to herself, to say, “How is it?” Suddenly she desired to know if he was enjoying his Spangler, if reading it was making any difference to him, her husband of close to twenty years.

  In the pumping of her heart and the moisture of her palms she almost lost her courage. The moment from the incipient wish to the clenched stomach and trembling hands was too brief, and the occasion when she could have spoken without tuning in passed. She considered what she was going to say: “How is it?” or “How’s the book?” or “What are you reading these days?” and each seemed more stilted than the last. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

  His book smacked shut, the light switch clicked, and she opened her eyes to him vanishing up the hall stairs. “How is it?” she shouted. “How’s your book?”

  He returned with the delight she had so hoped to avoid. “Yes?” he said. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  He made an annoyed little bow. “Nothing, indeed.”

  Ultimately, Kate decided in bed, it was just as well not to endanger the elegant clarity of the status quo.

  During the sit-trot, Teddy ran up on Herbie, who put back his ears and threatened to kick, and during the posting trot, he would not move out unless John pounded his sides. He cut all corners and flattened all circles, large and small. He would not take the proper lead at the canter, and would take mouthfuls of grass, bracing his teeth against the bit and jerking John out of the saddle. He knew the high-headed evasions, the jaw-jutting evasions, and the brute-strength evasions. He was wearing John out, both his energy and his patience, so Kate cut the first half of the class short and went on to the jumping, usually the least of evils when one was starting out with Teddy. He refused the logpile three times and John fell off. Kate handed him a sturdy whip. The fourth time Teddy went over the fence, but took off too soon and left John behind. In spite of her certainty, Kate grew almost afraid. The usual chatter among the other riders stilled, and as John trotted back up the field, his face red and full of angry hatred, Kate felt strangely disobedient. “You’re doing fine . . .” she began.

  “I loathe this horse. I abominate him! He shits!”

  “Mary Rogers . . .”

  “Damn Mary Rogers!”

  “You’ll get bet . . .”

  “Hell!”

  “John, don’t . . .”

  “Fuck! I said ‘fuck’!”

  “Say it again, please.” He did not, and she could see that he was angrily afraid, having broken suddenly into new territory. Two years before Axel had thrashed Peter with a hunting crop for cursing at Margaret, and that only a “goddamn.”

  “Again, I said.”

  “Fuck.” He coughed.

  “Thank you. Dismount, please.” Teddy yawned, then helped himself to grass. His ears flopped in perfect self-confidence, and he cocked one back hoof. Kate took the reins, but declined the crop John offered her. “Theodore, stand up!” she ordered. In a second, she was on top of him and he was describing a large circle in a nicely collected and extremely surprised trot. Two small circles to the left. Two to the right. Figure eight at the canter with a flying change of lead. Halt. Back four steps. Extended trot down the long side of the ring. Teddy’s tongue dropped out of his mouth in his effort to take the bit. “Stop that,” she said. His poll bent, his neck arched, and he began to sweat. She brought him down to the collected trot again, this time almost a passage, and made him two-track across the ring, a lovely diagonal movement with Teddy’s ankles crossing one another like a dancer’s. Around the end of the ring at a normal trot, then two-tracks the other way. Walk, halt. A moment’s relaxation, then she picked him up again and took him over the stone wall and the rails. When she returned him panting to her son, she said, “Teddy is not a beginner’s horse. If he were, I would not have mounted you on him.”

  For lunch Kate made them a treat: peanut-butter-and-bacon sandwiches with cucumbers and tomatoes on the side. Before they thundered in, a moment of motherhood, fathomless and self-contained, like a blue bead, was given her. She was not, just then, a failed equestrian, a bluegrass exile in soybean country, a would-be nun, an ambitious riding coach. She was not the person to whom motherhood was an eighteen-year surprise. She loved them as they came in: Peter too tall, John too temperamental, Margaret too sentimental, Henry too careless. She even loved them when John dropped the
plate of cookies and Henry and Peter each stepped on one before Margaret could pick them up. Out of love for them, she said, “I’m putting up a new housework schedule today, and this summer I expect you to stick with it.”

  In the early afternoons, when the children were outside or upstairs, Kate retreated to the living room and pulled the doors shut behind her. Even on the hottest summer days, she prized her privacy more than an occasional breeze. Ostensibly she had work to do: there were accounts to be written up and horse shows to be considered and possibly entered, items to be ordered from Kauffman’s or Miller’s in New York, people and businesses to be corresponded with or telephoned. Actually, though, the chores dissolved in the pleasure of her solitude, and the living room never seemed to her an arena of work, like the kitchen or the bedroom or the barns. In her mind’s eye she sat there, in the domesticated golden sunlight, on the once cerulean velvet sofa, lapped around by carpets and books and mahogany, solitary and content, as if, in fact, cloistered. (She swore up and down that, had she converted before marriage, there would have been none of this horse business, none of these children.) The silver on the sideboard tarnished so slowly that it seemed merely to be fading, the stacks of horse magazines grew discreetly, and, since she and Axel never entertained, the living room took on a permanent, close-fitting privacy that centered around these two daily hours, from one to three, when the world knew by instinct to leave her alone. In the other twenty-two hours of the day, she squirreled away her more difficult problems like nuts, saving them for this time and this place, when she could take them out and luxuriate in them: if not finding solutions, then at least defining them down to almost visible dimensions.