Barn Blind

by Jane Smiley

  They piled other show equipment nearby: shiny round buckets, curry combs with all their teeth, clean stable cloths, folding hoof picks, fly sheets with Kate’s name emblazoned on each side. They even found three leather lead lines, brass fitted, and the sheepskin nose pad for MacDougal’s halter that had been lost three years before.

  This was the nature of horse shows: heat and bone-shaking fatigue from lack of sleep and too much to do, dust, nausea from excitement and missed meals, the heightened awareness of a few things (the van, the horses, the saddles, mother). The children focused so hard on these things that they lost any sense of the voluntary. Henry demanded at the last minute that they take his bicycle. He was ignored. Margaret cried. She was ignored, though she hadn’t cried in almost two weeks. Peter fell off MacDougal, and he was ignored, though he limped slightly for the rest of the afternoon. John avoided payment for entry fees and black boots. He was not ignored, although he smiled cheerfully and stayed out of the way.

  The boots, it turned out, were in Kate’s closet. John had been allowed to try them on and to take them to his room. Sometime after that they disappeared, and Margaret could not find them to pack the day before their departure. John was sitting cross-legged under the oak tree, feeling rather good and cleaning Peter’s saddle, but when she said she couldn’t locate them, he knew. “O.K.,” he said.

  “Well, I’m ready for them now.”

  “All right, already.” But he made no move.

  “Well?”

  “Just put in the old ones.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. They’re inches too short, and last year you could hardly walk in them.”

  “O.K., O.K.!” He tilted the saddle up on its pommel edge, and set the sponge and the soap deliberately beside one another.

  “Come on! I’ve got a lot to do!”

  “Yeah, right.” The children were not allowed into mother’s things without permission, a point which John finessed by remarking in Kate’s hearing as he ran up the stairs, “I’ll just get them from mother’s room, and you can put them in right now.”

  “Good grief,” said Margaret.

  “Young man,” said Kate, when he returned with the box under his arm. He had looked inside. They were slender, inky, gleaming, desirable.

  “In a minute,” he said, hurrying for the back door.

  “John.”

  “Yeah.” He turned toward her, put the box down. A moment later he stepped away from it. She did not raise her voice or interpose herself between him and the doorway. The effect of her dry brown skin, brilliant gaze, and liquid voice was always to make his wishes coincident with hers, sooner or later. “I’m going to put these in the tack trunk,” he said, “then I guess I’ll try and find that money.”

  “You can leave it on the corner of my dresser.”

  “Sure.” Even his temper was stalled until she vanished into the living room for her afternoon rest, and he banged out of the screen door. “Well, hold it up then,” said Peter to Henry in the basement, “and get out of the way.” The annoyance in his voice, though slight and no doubt justified, catalyzed John’s rage. He jerked open the boot box, tearing the lid when it resisted him. White: a delicate sheet of tissue paper partly veiled them. Black: the arch of the molded instep melted into the long shin. Here was the rounded calf, here the flat of the inner ankle. His hand touched the skin of one boot. Though fully lined with more leather, it was soft, damageable. A printed sheet inside said, “These are your new . . .” He took them out and laid them on the gravel and dust of the driveway. Then he stomped on them, ground his heels into them, spat on them, picked them up and beat them against the corner of the back step. Once he said the word “Cunt.” His anger would not have subsided if Peter hadn’t come to the basement doorway, then to the top of the basement steps. He was mild, distractedly, naturally, astonishingly mild. “What are you doing?” he remarked.

  “I’m, uh . . .” John dropped the boots. “I’m, uh, breaking in my new boots.”

  “Oh.”

  “She’s a cunt.”

  “Well . . .”

  “Don’t be so fucking agreeable.”

  Peter went back down the stairs. In the basement, he said, “Did you put in both bars of soap?” then, “Don’t ask me, ask him.” But Henry did not appear. It was Margaret who later cleaned the boots, shined over the new scars, and packed them. At dinner, Kate made a point of saying, “Thank you, John, I got it.”

  Ten dollars left. Nothing.

  The sun, at last, had set. The tack trunks were packed, the three horses braided, the pressed riding jackets and shirts and breeches sheathed in plastic. Margaret sat on the front porch deep in her father’s old armchair, exhausted, waiting for the right moment to go upstairs to bed. A cool wind picked up, promising at least a shower; Margaret shoved her bare arms behind her and pressed herself more deeply into the chair. Her eyes were closed, and she was listening to the thump and brush of tree limbs on the porch roof. No one sat out here much anymore, because the lilacs and boxelders had been allowed to grow up thick all around, and even in a dry summer the place tended to be dank, dusty, and close. Margaret was alone, and she cherished it like a prize. She listened to the indoor noises of John’s bath, Henry’s evening snack, mother’s last-minute instructions, and the click of Jeepers’s toenails across the hall floor. The life they signified was as alluring as the momentary vision of a man pouring wine at a white-clothed table in the passing light of a dining car, but also as distant. Margaret shivered, pushed her hands further underneath the chair cushion, and dropped another notch toward sleep.

  The screen door behind her banged, and she incorporated it into her half dream as a little hump in the road, over which she could easily carry this burden of sleep, but then Axel said, “Margaret, shouldn’t you go to bed, honey?” and she woke up.

  “I’m fine, daddy.”

  Instead of retreating, he came closer. “Don’t you need a sweater? I didn’t realize how chilly it’s gotten.”

  “I’m fine, daddy.”

  He sat down in the rocking chair, the one with the loose rocker, and began to rock. Squeak, squeak. Margaret drew up her knees, sighed, and pretended to be asleep, but he continued to rock, and in fact spoke. “Are you all about ready for the show?”

  “Huh?” She pretended to wake up.

  “I said I guess you’re about ready for the show.”

  “Just about.” She thought to herself that after all it was his front porch, and then she woke up completely in surprise at these new thoughts. She had never ever not welcomed her father, not been glad at his appearance. Guiltily, she scraped her chair backward, so that he could see her, as it was his paternal right to do. “Margaret,” he said, “I think you’ve grown up quite a lot in this last year. You’ve gotten to be a very reliable young woman. And quite pretty.”

  “Oh, daddy. I am eighteen,” she said, then blushed slightly at the churlish tone in her voice.

  “No, it’s true. I’m very impressed.”

  “And very biased. Lots of the girls at school were much more mature than I am.”

  “Sophisticated, perhaps, but . . .”

  Somehow, it was intolerable. “Can we not talk about it?”

  “Sure.” Axel rocked and squeaked. Margaret shivered, then rubbed her hands over her upper arms. In the light from the door she could only see the outline of his forehead, eye socket, cheek, and chin, then the soft collar of his shirt. At such a time two years ago, she knew, he would have begun slapping his pockets for a pack of cigarettes. Camels. Before that he had smoked Pall Malls, and before that Lucky Strikes. “Lucky Strikes.” The words struck her oddly. “Bring me a carton of Luckies. Pick up a pack of Luckies when you go.” The father who’d said those things seemed suddenly an impossibly historic man and Margaret felt herself established and unchildlike in remembering them. She looked down at her legs, which shone goose-pimply in the light. She had put on shorts before dinner, but had not until this moment felt cold. Her thighs looked strange to
her, pale and soft, like the chest of a domestic bird, and she wished she had slacks on. And shoes. She lifted herself and sat on her feet.

  “Do you expect to do well tomorrow?” said Axel.

  “Oh, no. But it’s O.K.”

  “Margaret.”

  “Yes, daddy?” How could she tell him that the concern in his voice was unbearable? That she didn’t want to be approached as if she were a problem or a sensitive plant, that in fact she didn’t want to be approached or praised or considered at all?

  “Margaret, you seem to have gotten so passive, somehow. I don’t know how to explain it.”

  “I’m fine, daddy.”

  “Are you?”

  “I do wish you would quit asking me. I’m fine. Really fine. Truly fine.”

  “You were a very straightforward little girl, as I remember. We always used to laugh about the time when you were three and Peter was two, and he dropped something at dinner, his bread, I think it was. Anyway, he was banging his cup on the highchair, and I was talking, and your mother was doing something at the stove, and all of a sudden you yelled, “Give him another bread, God damn it! He’s hungry!”

  “I remember that story.”

  “And then the nuns always used to remark about how outspoken you were in grammar school. A little too outspoken for them, I’m afraid.”

  “I suppose.”

  “It’s going to rain.” He said this with an air of having changed the subject and Margaret blushed. “Yes,” was all she could think of, though. She was thoroughly surprised at herself. She hadn’t talked to Axel much lately, but only, she thought, because he hadn’t been around. In her entire life, there was no one she could talk with more simply than her father, who, at least with her, was the most playful of men, and the most accessible. She glanced quickly at him again, saw again the soft cheek and the loose collar, and again blushed. She was glad that in the dark he couldn’t see these blushes, for she knew that he would take them, somehow, as accusations. She looked around the porch. There wasn’t much—four chairs with the ones they were sitting in, a leaf rake, a small pile of newspapers, the dead stalk of a geranium stuck in a clay pot. Outside, the handlebars of Henry’s bicycle could be seen leaning against the screen. There was nothing in the careless arrangement of these objects that could relieve either Margaret’s embarrassment or her perplexity, so she looked again at her knees. She said, “The rain will probably be good. That show can get so dusty.” The show was two hundred miles away. “I mean, if it rains there. I guess it probably won’t rain there.”

  “It might.” Axel continued to rock. He too was having unusual difficulties in finding things to talk of. He thought that the trouble with having a problem child was that the child thought you always wanted to talk about the problem, so that every mention of the weather became an evasion, and every word of praise became an introduction to a discussion of the child’s potential. Axel didn’t know what Margaret’s potential was. She seemed to him what she always had—a lovely, healthy, laughing girl who looked pretty when she smiled and still hadn’t quite grown into her features. He thought she was a late bloomer and was not anxious to force her. It was she, he thought, who met his most conventional greetings with the demand that he not worry about her, so that, in spite of himself, he had begun to. He grunted, almost angrily, and rocked a bit faster. His children were growing up. He was used to their being constructively occupied and accounted for. “One more summer,” he said to himself. “Just let me have one more quiet summer, then I’ll be glad to worry.” He looked at Margaret, who in spite of her years on horseback seemed white and soft, and thought what a strain it was, having a virgin around the house. Ashamed of himself, he said wisely, “Look, dear girl, it’ll all be fine.”

  She started again, and corrected him carefully. “It is fine, daddy.”

  “My mistake.”

  She took him seriously. “That’s all right.” Her dark hair, too long and unstylish, fell forward and she pushed it back. It was odd, he thought, to live with and love so dearly an eighteen-year-old girl that he, at eighteen, would never have dated, or even noticed, a girl like the blind dates he had stayed far away from, whose friends advertised them as being “nice” or having “personality.” Living with Margaret, living with both his older children, in fact, impressed upon him how shallow he had been at seventeen or eighteen, when his most frequent thought was that he deserved only the best, and would have only the best, and knew to perfection just what the best was. It moved him suddenly that Margaret and Peter, his own children, had already attained a depth that he, honestly, might never attain. When she said, “Well, I’m going to bed,” and got up gracelessly from her chair, and stepped gracelessly past him into the house, he wanted to impart something to her about her nature, about how he had seen her every day since the day she was born, and yet she was still a surprise to him; he wanted to say something about the human mystery of not adding up, something not about what he had learned, but about what there was to learn. He could not. He said, “Good night.”

  5

  JOHN opened his eyes and looked around the room. He had been dreaming of water and awakened from the dream energetically but incompletely. It took a second or two to realize that it was raining, steadily though not tempestuously, and had been for a while at least. He smiled to himself and stretched beneath his covers. The room was cool, the beat of the rain rhythmic, and he felt suddenly freed of obligations, as if snowbound. He stretched again, expansively, reaching his hands and feet to the four corners of the cradling, spacious, homey bed. He turned on his side and rearranged the cool pillow under his cheek. He brought up his knee, twitched the covers just a half inch to the left, and, exquisitely comfortable, set himself to fall back into an excellent slumber. Then he remembered the saddle.

  He woke up immediately and tried not to panic, tried instead to go over in minute detail the course of all his actions before dinner.

  Margaret had sent him after his boots. He had spoken to mother and lost his temper outside. He had gone back to the saddle briefly, then returned to the house to go to the bathroom. After that he looked for his stock, his stock pin, and the silver polish, which he’d intended to use on Peter’s stirrup irons. He’d failed to find the silver polish.

  Here he pretended that he couldn’t quite remember what he’d done next, because what he’d done next was to go feed the horses, then come in for dinner, then put the money on mother’s dresser, then sit down to dinner, then help Henry with the dishes, then it had gotten dark, and he had told mother that he was all ready to go, and she had said, O.K., he’d better take his bath and go to bed, and he had done so, allowing himself to read one article in the National Geographic before turning out the light.

  Nowhere in this catalog of activities did he find anything having to do with putting the saddle away, yet surely he had not left it out under the oak tree? Nobody ever left a saddle out. It was second nature for all of them to keep leather under cover, especially suède.

  Suède! Of all the saddles (and two years ago mother had bought them each a new saddle, each a Stuebben) Peter’s was the nicest, and had the most suède. John had chosen a sturdy, not very expensive model with patches of gray, foam-filled, velvet-smooth suède on the knee flaps, and Margaret’s had been like his, but Peter’s fitting problems were peculiar, and the only one mother had been able to find (in New York) was the top-of-the-line model, padded all over the flaps and seat with what seemed to be an acre of the stuff. She had lectured him the entire summer on not being forgetful about getting it wet. She had complained aloud of the expense, but consoled herself with the knowledge that a saddle like that would last a lifetime or longer. John listened to the rain, shuddered, and crept deeper into his bed. As much as he feared for the saddle, he hated even more the idea of getting up in the cold, going out into the wet, and finding it there, sodden. Muddy, maybe. Perhaps even now it was sitting in a puddle.

  And what would he do with it when he found it? Obviously the thing would be r
uined. How could he face it alone, in the middle of the night, by himself? Where could he leave it? What sort of note could he put on it, to show that he had been careless, bethought himself, suffered the most severe chagrin? A note would be ridiculous, but even less could he stand the idea of the saddle mute and destroyed, merely sitting on the kitchen floor as if he didn’t care. And Peter would know what had happened to it, because Peter knew he was cleaning it for the show. And Peter would be angry. And Peter would be hurt.

  He remembered how he had badgered Peter into letting him clean the saddle, and realized that Peter would think he had planned the whole thing.

  “Oh, God!” said John, and put his hand over his mouth, afraid of having been heard.

  In a moment, he threw back the covers, shivered in the dark, and went to the window. The leafy limbs of the oak tree massed blackly below. Honestly, he could see nothing but blackness and puddles, although it seemed to him that he could discern some glinting thing through the branches, right where the saddle would be. He opened the window and leaned out, but the cold rain in his hair and down the back of his neck distracted his gaze. He could see nothing.

  It seemed impossibly mean not to go down and bring it in, and yet he could not. Innocence, he thought, would be by far the best policy, at least until the wreck was found and he was blamed. If only it would stop raining. He stood back from the window without closing it, and tried to detect some intermission of the falling streams, but could not. He groaned and stood motionless. Then, suddenly, there was surcease. The intensity of the shower dropped, it turned to drizzle, then quit entirely. John stood still, his teeth chattering, for a very long moment, then slowly closed his window. In a second he was back in bed, warm, at least, and apparently decided about not going downstairs. The three or so hours before dawn stretched luxuriously, and the rest of his life loomed after them, a block of time that somehow would be dealt with. He snuggled down into his bed. Where, he thought, had he learned so thoroughly to get into trouble? Trouble had come to seem his permanent condition.