Barn Blind

by Jane Smiley

  “Yessir!” The colt side-stepped and arched his back; the saddle was still novel, and he kept turning his head for a look at it. After three circuits of the paddock, though, he was calm, almost blasé. John fished a piece of apple out of his pocket and palmed it between the horse’s lips. They made three more circuits in the opposite direction. Peter came up and tightened the girth two notches. There was anxiety, but no protest. John found another piece of apple. “A nice colt, I think,” remarked Peter.

  “Sort of weedy in the neck.”

  “That might fill out.”

  “I tried to kiss Lisa Campbell at the horse show.”

  “No luck?”

  “Might have, but mom made us go out to dinner when I was supposed to meet her at the barns.”

  “Yeah, her and Beanie and every other guy at the show.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Good luck.”

  “She’s not so bad.”

  “Well, she doesn’t sell it, anyway.”

  After they had tacked up Boots, John said, “Can’t you really remember what it was like? I bet she didn’t even do it.”

  “Yeah, well, she did. But, Christ, I was Henry’s age, what did I know? I mean, it was nice.”

  Schooling the five two-year-olds took an hour. When they were done, it was past time for dinner. John said, “I think we’re retarded.” Peter did not answer. “Really,” John went on, “some guys are getting laid, you know.”

  Still Peter said nothing.

  “John Murphy for one, and Bill Scavullo.”

  Peter turned toward the house.

  “You’re more retarded than I am. She’s done it, you know. The whole family might be normal if it wasn’t for her!” Then he marveled at how angry he sounded, because he wasn’t angry at all, at least not at Peter. He was just curious, just curious. It was surprising the angers that a person in his condition could stumble into.

  A moment before waking Margaret knew she was dreaming, and her dream self said to her waking self, “This is important.” The words were precise, distinctly spoken in a firm, rather teacherly voice, but her own voice. The alarm went off. It was 4 A.M., still dark, and not unusually Margaret awoke in full awareness of what had to be done. It was not until a few hours later, during the sleepy forty-five-minute trip to the Lyons County Fairgrounds, that she remembered the voice or any of the dream that had occasioned it. Of that she remembered only a single image, a targeted jump with more jumps beyond it (a triple in-and-out, perhaps?), and the sense of herself toppling toward it, though strangely, very strangely, without fear, without the usual feeling of mixed shame, apprehension, and relief that accompanied falling off a horse, even in dreams.

  She was, it was true, oddly nervous about this show, as if in the last week or so the floor had dropped out of her equestrian knowledge, and there was nothing except conscious thought and memory preserving her from danger. Mother’s old injuries seemed prominent—always the arm was visible; turned slightly in Margaret’s direction, or illuminated by a shaft of sunlight, or inconveniently impeding some action or operation. One, of course, did not think of mother as what you might call “handicapped,” but strictly, perhaps, she was.

  Once they found their stalls, there was more than the usual confusion setting up, because Peter’s first class was at nine, and here it was already eight-fifteen, and MacDougal had worked up such a sweat in the van that he had to be walked out, then brushed all over again before he could even be tacked up. And Peter had forgotten his socks, so that he and John had to share a single pair, and they were to ride in the same class twice in the afternoon. Mother was seriously annoyed. Even so, however, Margaret’s hearing was preternaturally acute, and all she was hearing was news of injuries and severe falls since the Chicago show. “Broken collarbone,” said someone walking by when she was bent over Mac’s left hind foot, painting on linseed oil. “Had to be destroyed right there,” wafted from the next group of stalls. “Broke its neck.” When she stood up and peered over the bars, she didn’t recognize the gossipers. But that didn’t make the phrase any less of an omen. When they had at last gotten Peter on board and pointed toward the warm-up ring, Henry ran over from the hotdog stand with the information that Beanie Campbell’s new pony had rubbed her off on a tree and broken her wrist. “Yeah?” said everyone, mostly indifferent. Margaret patted Peter’s boot. “Be careful,” she said. Though quizzical, he was not satirical. He nodded.

  It continued all day. Everywhere, the grownup riders were limping and stiff from ancient accidents, and the junior riders were either just getting started again after early summer mishaps, or sitting by the sidelines, resigning themselves to weeks and months of plaster casts and slings and the highly visible inconvenience of crutches. Mother’s position on her own injuries, reiterated every time the subject came up, was that you couldn’t do anything athletic for twenty, thirty, forty years without suffering damage of some sort, could you? Then she would smile, meaning to reassure, and assert that the principles she taught were most importantly safe ones. Here was Margaret, here were Peter and John and Henry, riding their entire lives and intact, one and all. Now, as she readied Herbie for their first class, regular working hunter on the flat, such luck seemed to Margaret as tenuous as rubber bands, stretching and stretching. Herbie was so solid, though, so demonstrably there, that the looming accident seemed to roll away from her toward one of her brothers. Down the row a stall door slammed in the breeze like a shot, an explosion, a car wreck. Margaret jumped, and thought of Peter falling, rolled on, stepped on, splintered. No one really knew the depths of perversity in MacDougal’s heart.

  These were not things she usually thought of.

  The man, whom Margaret did not immediately recognize, was standing in the way when she pushed open Herbie’s stall door. His riding clothes, she then noticed with a start and a blush, were custom made, with old wide-pegged breeches and long tops to the boots. “Excuse me,” she croaked.

  “Huh?” He only slowly came to attention, and did not seem to recognize her at all. She regained her composure.

  “I said, ‘Excuse me.’ ”

  “Sorry.” But he didn’t step out of the way. She blushed again that she had thought so often about someone to whom she was entirely unknown. She said, rather irritably, “Can I help you with something?” He was looking curiously at Teddy, who was dozing. She meant, Go away. “Is there something you want?”

  “What? No. Oh, no. I seem to have lost my horses, but I see them over there. Wrong aisle. Pardon me.” He smiled that smile which asserted perfect innocence, and demanded a smile as open in return. Like mother’s smile, or Peter’s. As with mother and Peter, Margaret complied, and as always with them she felt better afterward. One should, she thought, expect to be forgotten.

  After her hunter hack class, which was a failure because she felt too precarious to thrust herself forward and claim the judge’s attention, she encountered the man in the warm-up ring. He sat astride his handsome dark gray Thoroughbred, who had a wall-eye, she noticed, and he looked far more attentive.

  “Yellow,” he declared as she went by.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said, ‘Yellow.’ That horse ought to have yellow ribbons instead of red ones, and you should have a yellow rose in your buttonhole.” He smiled again. “Or your hair.”

  “It would fall out and I would look stupid and unkempt.” She pushed the frizzled ends around her ears under her velvet cap. “I have enough trouble as it is.”

  The ringmaster announced a number. “That’s me,” said the man. “What’s your name?”

  “Margaret Karlson.”

  “Aha!” But he rode away without explaining himself, and had a nice round, good enough for second in the green handy hunter class. Margaret, somewhat to her relief, did not see him again that day.

  Seven people fell off, five fell with their horses. The ambulance came into the ring twice, neither time for her or either of her brothers. The socks they were sharing (thank
God John was wearing his new boots, which, unlike his old pair, didn’t have to be tugged and coaxed for fifteen minutes before he could get his feet into them) seemed to be lucky ones. Teddy, though out of the ribbons in the hack class, won the junior hunter over fences with an astonishing burst of style that included pricked ears and smoothly rounded turns. They were also third in the American Horse Shows Association Medal class, beating out a picture-perfect blonde on a picture-perfect chestnut mare who, when she and John had to trade mounts for individual performances, could not by any means induce Teddy to take the left lead during the figure eight, although he had flown through the maneuver for John. The chestnut mare moved as delightfully as she appeared to, and John had a glimpse of life without strategy before returning her. Only his recent bellicose mood helped him welcome Teddy upon his return. There was pleasure to be had at re-entering the fray.

  Peter did as well, first winning the Medal class on Herbie (mother did not dare risk some defenseless equestrienne encountering MacDougal if the judge asked Peter to trade horses), then taking second in the junior jumper on his regular mount. The fences in the jump-offs neared five feet, higher than Peter had jumped Mac at home, but to all appearances Peter was imperturbable. They lost by a time fault. The expected catastrophe failed to befall, and Margaret need not have squeezed her eyes shut during the last round, need not have anticipated the huge common gasp, the screams, or the groans.

  Mother was pleased. She said, “It’s not as if you’d won a combined event, of course, but then . . .” After that she drifted away in the direction of colleagues and compliments, and left the children to close things up for the night. Margaret strayed through the aisle where the man kept his horses. Next to the lovely gray was a Welsh pony, evidence, perhaps, of a child. Margaret felt exposed, embarrassed, nasty. When she got back to their row, she snapped at Henry for not filling the water buckets, although it didn’t matter.

  It was better, she decided the next day, not to relinquish her fears. Worry, after all, had worked splendidly the day before, rather in the manner of an umbrella. While she was rebraiding Herbie before the first class (“You’ve got perfectly good red ribbons on that horse already,” said mother, but stopped at the drugstore without being asked), she summoned to mind every accident she could remember, and every one she could possibly imagine. Though hardly as pungent as they had been the day before, her thoughts were quite engrossing. She didn’t even glance toward the aisle of the gray hunter and the Welsh pony.

  She proceeded to the tail, dutifully envisioning MacDougal’s dive through innumerable posts and rails, Peter flipping through space, clawing the air, etc. “What are you doing?” said the man. She had wanted him to appear sometime, but here he was, and she wasn’t glad. He pronounced “you” in a peculiar way, entirely specific, almost intimate, as if he enjoyed rights that obviated any necessity of using her name.

  “I daren’t say.”

  “Now that you’ve said that, you must.”

  “I’m braiding yellow ribbons into my horse’s tail.”

  “Anything else?”

  Margaret looked at him for the first time, wondering if he remembered her from the Chicago show, or if he was merely being friendly. Today he wore ratcatcher clothes, browns and golds. These, too, were ampler than the current fashion, and not flattering to his dark hair and fair skin. He was, however, not unhandsome. “Yes,” but she grimaced, regretting her coquetry.

  “Do go on.”

  It was best to be as businesslike as possible. “I was thinking about my brother crashing a big post and rails, as a matter of fact.”

  “Does he do that very often?”

  “Hasn’t ever.”

  “Is that your brother who rode the feisty bay jumper yesterday?”

  She nodded. “I think if I think about all the possible accidents, then none of them will happen.”

  “But some people say if you worry about things, you draw them to yourself.” When she glanced at him hard, alarmed, he went on, “Your brother’s an excellent horseman. One of the best I’ve seen.”

  “Do you think that makes any difference?”

  “I certainly hope so.”

  “But he’s only been this good for the last couple of weeks. I mean, he’s always been good, but this is the first year he’s ridden Mac, and up until about two weeks ago, they didn’t get along at all. I guess I’m afraid that the charm will end. Besides, my mother says that if you ride horses long enough you’re bound to get hurt.”

  “Some folks more than others, I should think.”

  “Well, she says that, too.” She wound the rattail of the braid into a secure knot and hid the end in the side pieces. He said, “You’re very good at that.”

  “I’ve had lots of practice.” Still he used that “you.” Oddly, though he was entirely friendly, when he used that “you,” she could imagine him accusatory. “We’ve all had lots of practice at all this stuff, and never any accidents, but I’m sort of superstitious lately. You have a nice gray horse. Well, my mother’s had some accidents, before we were grown up. On Mac, that’s the bay horse.”

  “Are you grown up now?”

  “Well . . .” He was very grown up. She thought of the Welsh pony. It made adulthood rather dangerous. He was most handsome when he smiled, but also when he smiled he made her think that Peter was the handsomer of the two. Peter, now that she came to think of it, was really quite something. “Excuse me,” she said, “I’ve got to . . .”

  “Good morning. I’m Katherine Karlson.” Hand extended, teeth glittering, mother had adopted her most hunt-ball manner. The man, who had been leaning against the feed rack, stood up and stepped forward. “Harrison Randolph,” he declared. “From Virginia, not these parts, I’m sorry to say.”

  Mother’s eyebrows lifted. No doubt, thought a somewhat embarrassed Margaret, she was impressed by the well-known equestrian name. It was oddly disturbing that mother should be impressed by anything. “Only second cousins,” said Harrison Randolph, “and distant ones at that.”

  “But with the hereditary eye for a horse? I was impressed by your gray yesterday. But he can’t be very old?”

  “Three-year-old.”

  Words guaranteed to antagonize. Margaret blushed for the man, and for her mother, who never let an occasion pass. And, indeed, Kate’s next comment was a provocative “hmmp.”

  “Excuse me?” He was very polite, very neat. He looked like a man who was familiar with suit racks and clothes brushes and shoe trees. Surely for that reason alone mother would . . . She did not. She had thrust her hands into the pockets of her old tweed jacket, and now she tossed her hair. “Broken down by five,” she said. “You forward-seat Virginians haven’t a notion of bones and tendons, I must say. The youngest I’ve ever shown a horse is as a six-year-old, and you can look at the result.” She waved her hand toward MacDougal’s and Teddy’s stalls. “Fifteen, sixteen years old, and sound through. Never a sidebone, ringbone, osselet even. My vet comes to tend to accidents and that’s about it.”

  Margaret coughed. The man was superhumanly courteous; still smiling slightly, head canted to one side, attentive. From Virginia, though, far away. And one couldn’t forget about the Welsh pony.

  Mother went on. As John would say, mother could be counted on to go on. “You ride very far forward, in fact. I watched you particularly yesterday, and honestly there were times I was almost uneasy. If you lengthened your stirrups and placed your weight more nearly over the horse’s center of gravity, you really would be safer, I think. Such a lovely Thoroughbred shouldn’t have to run the risk of having his knees broken.” She smiled with dazzling, winning certainty, but Margaret could see the man’s excellent manners deflect it. “Perhaps you’re right,” he responded.

  “God bless you,” said Kate. “Forgive me. Margaret can tell you. My pet theories.” The self-deprecation sounded merely formal.

  “Your children have benefitted from them.”

  “They ride safely, and at times they do well
, I’ll admit. Margaret,” her voice was a bit loud, a bit naked.

  “Yes, mother?”

  “Are you ready for this class you’re in? Where are the boys? Have you had any breakfast? Do you know the course? Have the horses been fed, watered?” Needless queries that she wouldn’t have made without a Virginian audience. She didn’t await the answers. “I must go, I guess. Margaret too. Your jacket is hanging in the van. Really, I must be off.”

  “It was a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Karlson.”

  “Kate. The pleasure was entirely mine, Mr. Randolph. Do join me in the stands, if your schedule allows?”

  “I will, thank you.”

  “Margaret?” but her voice trailed off as she wandered away.

  “Must you go?”

  “Soon, anyway.” She had tacked up, and was now securing strap ends and picking bits of hay from the corners of Herbie’s mouth. She lingered, but after all there was nothing more to say. Once anyone had met mother, there was often nothing more to say.

  “Goodness,” he said.

  “She . . .”

  “Your mother is a very powerful person.”

  “I suppose so. She . . .”

  “Can I buy you a hotdog after this class?”

  Yes. Yes. Yes. She tightened one of the yellow ribbons. “No, please. I’ve got to help Peter get ready, I think. There’s a lot to do. The boys only have one pair of socks.”

  “Just a hotdog?”

  Could anyone deny that smile? It brought so clearly to mind the other undeniable smiles that she loved. “O.K.”

  “Meet you back here?”

  “O.K.” She sounded terribly ungracious, she knew, but she was so embarrassed.

  “May I give you a leg up?”

  “No, thanks. I’ll mount in the warm-up ring. I, um, well, thank you.”

  “Good luck.”