Barn Blind

by Jane Smiley

  “It does seem like it’s going to be very hot.”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “I thought that I’d nail that sagging shutter up temporarily. After the show I can get a hinge. They’re pretty old.” At the beginning of their marriage, they had traded similar information in similar, almost false-sounding tones; these were not false, though, rather the efforts of two people whose lifelong refuge had been good manners to take refuge again. He smiled at the thought. He felt not victorious but happy.

  “Mrs. Karlson!” wailed a Pony Clubber from the doorway, “Phoebe took Snip out of his stall and gave him a whole bunch of water, and my class is supposed to start in fifteen minutes, and he’ll get sick!”

  “What class is it, Sidney?” She knelt beside the girl and put her arm over the small shoulders, an unwonted gesture that surprised and gratified Axel, since he knew that it was for him.

  “Walk-trot.”

  Kate stifled a smile. “We’ll watch him, sweetheart. But I think he’ll be fine.”

  “She shouldn’t have done it.”

  “I know.” Suddenly Kate stood up, glanced at him. Curiosity, fear. She had recollected herself. She followed the child outside, and in a moment he could hear her voice raised in the old, commanding tones.

  It seemed to Margaret that if she lodged a few very specific things in her mind, then a few very specific others would not have room to enter. Getting the smaller Pony Clubbers on their horses without temper or tears was one thing, keeping their mothers and fathers out of the way was another. “Thank you,” she would say, “but of course we try to make them as self-sufficient as possible. It really is safer that way. Yes, the horse is very big, but one of the gentlest on the farm, believe me.” She repeated it over and over, walking the parent away from child and horse. Then there were the farm tools to keep track of. Each pitchfork and shovel and rake was painted with a bright yellow stripe around the handle, and she sighed each time she noted a striped handle in the hands of a stranger. She also glanced into vans and trailers and collected the striped handles that she found. The feed room, fortunately, had been padlocked, and here was something else to think of—the whereabouts of the key.

  In addition, of course, were her classes (four plus the combined event) and Peter’s (it would be awful if Talbot Light didn’t even notice, and worse if he sneered). One could also think of John’s classes (he deserved something after a summer on Teddy) and wonder whether Henry would ride in the family class and try to figure out where that package of three hairnets had gotten to, and concentrate on every little thing, even the way one’s boots looked as one walked to the hotdog stand, but still there seemed to be both time and energy left over for the inspection of license plates, sight and thought left over to survey the crowd of riders and horses, even spectators, for a face and body she knew she would recognize the instant she saw it.

  There were no Virginia license plates, no gray three-year-old Thoroughbreds, not even any certifiable Welsh ponies, and the only old-fashioned breeches around belonged to Lambert Smith, seventy-three years old, who did mother the favor of riding in her horse show every year on the same questionably sound dun cob that he had hunted in the Cotswolds and in the Maryland Hunt country in better days. “Bless you,” said Margaret. “Mr. Smith, we can always count on you!”

  “My dear, you not only look more and more like your lovely mother, you show the benefit of her training, and her fine Maryland manners.”

  “Thank you!” But the compliment did not please her. Two cars drove in, both local, and from the direction of the warm-up ring came the sharp squeal of an angry horse, and the crack of a fenceboard being kicked. She excused herself, lodging her duties and responsibilities more firmly in her mind as she went, and averting her gaze from a row of trailers as penance for her hope; lots of times older exhibitors didn’t even show up the first afternoon, which was mostly for Pony Club, anyway.

  “I don’t want green,” said John. “I want white, and we took some to the last horse show. I saw them. Mother said you packed the tack trunk, so you must have lost them.”

  “I didn’t lose them.” Henry, mindful of his departure, found patience astonishingly easy. “Besides, Teddy would look stupid in exercise bandages.”

  “You don’t know that. Anyway, they cost five dollars a set, and I’m going to tell mother you lost them.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Then find them.”

  “What do I care. I don’t care about the stupid bandages.”

  “They were your responsibility.”

  “I don’t see why you’re so grouchy.”

  “I’m not grouchy.” Talbot Light had arrived. He’d said, “John did you say your name was? You’re fifteen?”

  “Yes,” John had replied. “I’ve stopped growing too,” but Talbot Light had already looked away from him, toward Margaret, for Christ’s sake. He had raised his voice and repeated himself: “We think that I stopped growing around Christmas.”

  “What?”

  “I’m five eight and a half.”

  “What? Yes, of course. Tall family.” That had been all. He had offered to stay out of their hair, to find a hotel in town and to pick up some breakfast on his own. “Nonsense,” Kate had demurred, but the judge had insisted, and John had been unable to bring himself to the man’s notice since. He braided and rebraided, soaped and resoaped, polished and repolished. Every square millimeter of his equipment gleamed, but there was no white, nothing to catch a judge’s eye in a maelstrom of browns and blacks, subdued canaries and well-bred blues. The only white hairs on Teddy were his whiskers, and in the interest of perfection, those had to go. He turned to Henry. “You lost them, you find them.”

  “You don’t need them.”

  “Just shut up, all right?”

  Henry shrugged and strolled away.

  The bandages were what he had settled on. That he knew they would look ridiculous made him the more angry that they couldn’t be found. He could tell that Henry wouldn’t find them, wouldn’t even look, and that if he went to mother, she would say, “What do you want them for anyway? Surely not Teddy? Don’t be silly,” walking away from him, not even looking at him, thinking of something else besides his need, anything else, as ever. Teddy shifted his weight, nearly treading on John’s toe. “You asshole,” he said. “You big fucking asshole.” Then he looked around, but mother was nowhere to be seen.

  Peter appeared, saying, “Have you seen the wire cutters?” as if the wire cutters were significant.

  “What for?”

  “I don’t know. They want them at the judge’s stand for something.”

  “What did he say to you?”

  “Who?”

  “Talbot Light, who else?”

  “I don’t know. ‘Do you have any wire cutters? We need some wire cutters here.’ Something.”

  “Did he speak to you by name?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Well, he knows my name.”

  “I think you should stay out of his hair.”

  “It wasn’t . . .”

  “It’s hard enough to be impartial when the exhibitors aren’t hanging on to you every minute.”

  “Hey, what’s with you?”

  “Nothing, but I think you should let me take him the wire cutters.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Just let me.”

  “Go ahead, but you’ve got to find them first.” He agreed so easily that John got angry, wanting to shout something about, well, maybe Peter didn’t think he had to make Light notice him, maybe he thought he was that good, well, they would just see, they would just see. Peter wandered away. The set of his shoulders was so beautiful that John wanted to shoot him.

  Night. A sharp slam. Door? Shutter? A table collapsing with its burden of costly equipment? Axel sat up in bed, instantly alert, and peered out the window. Nothing. He listened. Nothing more. He shrugged, but continued to gaze at the barns, the paddocks, the tent,
the hotdog stand, the bright driveway and the dim trees. The air was thick with humidity, almost itself white, almost itself coverlets or clouds. It was both unpleasant and terribly reassuring to breathe.

  Kate was asleep in her bed behind the wall. He could hear her characteristic aborted snore, more of a grumble than anything else. But she was everywhere too, except in his room, which seemed hooked on by the window to the real kingdom of farm life. He felt that if he gazed through it long enough, left it open wide enough, his room would spread out and thin, attach itself tight as lichen to the orb where she was ubiquitous.

  Even thinking this he thought it was absurd. Could he really love this woman that he so frequently disapproved of? How had she not failed him? As his wife, she offered little in the way of warmth, or understanding, or even conversation. As the mother of his children she had shown impatience with their infancies, blindness to their individual talents and desires, inflexibility in her determination to propel one or more of them into the track of her own ambitions. As a sexual object, even the object of lust from afar, she was worn out. As an intellect, she was narrow and getting narrower. Yet the list of indictments (which he broke off voluntarily, knowing that he could go, and had gone, on and on) meant nothing. There, out the window, behind the wall, closed into every closet and tack trunk, folded in every blanket, entwined with dandy brushes, scrub brushes, hair brushes, toilet brushes, tooth brushes, was life itself. He felt that the more he considered her, the more he was considering the mystery of life.

  He tried to remember other women he had known. His mother, aunts, cousins, early girlfriends, the two women he’d flirted with since Kate’s lightning conversion. Fine women, most of them. Generous, informative, motherly, passionate, but he had never felt in his encounters with them that he was encountering the world itself.

  Love, as far as he could tell, had nothing to do with what one got or didn’t get, even with reciprocity or gratitude, or kindness. Love, in fact, had nothing to do with individual histories. She was Kate and he, Axel, but his recent flirtation had nothing to do with his love for her, small, old, prejudiced, and petty persons that they were, and yet he loved her, he loved her, he loved her. His soul lived, in the end, to attach itself to the world she incorporated as easily as she drank her morning tea. Axel shook his head and laughed. Was any prey as virginal, as shy and wary of capture, as one’s wife of twenty years?

  Margaret, too, was wide-eyed. The noise had entered her dream as the sound of Peter falling off his horse, and the dream had wakened her.

  By the clock it was four-thirty. In half an hour the alarm would ring, and she would commence with her chores, so that, instead of falling back to sleep, she sat up, and she too looked out the window, which faced away from the barns and the driveway, across the west field, where four horses could be discerned in the shadows of a copse of trees. Even as she watched, they drifted single file out of the woods across a moonlit rise of ground, heads heavy, tails swinging, bodies relaxed in the odd rocking gait of serene equines. Rosie, Stonewall, Count Down, Tiptop. Then she realized that these were the wrong names; these were names from four or five years ago. Rosie had been sold to someone in California, Stonewall had been killed in a hunting accident near Chicago, Count Down was on loan to a friend of mother’s, and Tiptop . . . where was Tiptop? She couldn’t remember. Nor could she remember the names of the current foursome. They had paused to graze, but now lifted their weighty heads and strolled toward the house. They passed from view again but their names didn’t occur to her, although the names of countless others did: John Hancock, Downey’s Gal, Dinky, Oscar, Jelly Bean, Jiminy Cricket. She could not remember which ones were still around, or how the others had come to depart, or even if they had owned and cared for all the names that flooded her. What, then, had she done in the past year that the minute knowledge of every animal on the farm, which was in a way the minute knowledge of her own history, had escaped her?

  There were other things she couldn’t remember now that she thought of them: her college roommate’s real name, the names of most of her teachers, the face of the one freshman boy she had dated twice (though she could remember his yellow slacks and the way, when he sat down, he smoothed both palms down the insides of his thighs as if the fabric distressed him). What had they spoken of on those two dates? Why had he asked her out a second time? Surely she hadn’t bored him with mother, the farm, Herbie, her brothers, for those six or eight hours they’d spent alone (alone?) together. When she thought of the yellow slacks, though, she was visited with the flavor of those months, the sensation of thinking so hard about one subject that thought itself was exhausting, and the subject, while still attractive, was also repellent, as if the brain recoiled from exerting itself any longer. Ah, then, yes. She had gone on and on about her home and her family. Not so much on the first date. On the first date she had made a conscientious effort, but on the second date she had talked and he had nodded and sipped his beers and taken her home at eleven-fifteen, and she had been too wound up in her obsession to feel ashamed.

  Now, at home, she felt ashamed.

  So what had become of her this summer? Nothing about the farm or the horses held her as they had at Bennett. The bolts that screwed her flat to this scene outside and all the other of all her days had broken. She couldn’t remember these horses and she didn’t care. She expected no longer to win her classes or to shine on Herbie, and she didn’t care. She remembered a boy on a buckskin at some show, maybe this summer, who had been looking fixedly at his booted toe. Now it seemed to her that this was the story of her life; for as many years as she could remember, she had been staring at one booted toe or the other, understanding somehow that if she looked up and looked around, everything about the horses and the farm would become trivial. And now that she had thought these thoughts, what was she to do?

  Four forty-five. What did people do, after all? More basically, how did they know what there was to do? Muffy (her roommate, what was her real name?) was intending to be a curator. How had she found out about that, how had it even occurred to her? Other girls had intended to be other things: an actuary, a kindergarten teacher, a housewife, an archeologist, a newspaper reporter. At the time, such occupations had been merely words to her, phrases whose meaning she had understood, but that meant nothing to her imagination. Mother was none of these things.

  Once she’d intended to be a nun. After that her ambition was breeding horses. Now there was nothing. What did one do when all the obsessions drained away? Five o’clock. The alarm blared a moment before she punched it, and for the first time in her willing life, what she was getting up to accomplish seemed like work.

  “Well, you can’t ride your bicycle today, and that’s final. How can you be so ridiculous? I need your help.”

  “Mrs. Karlson.” Ellen Eisen held up the broken cheek strap of Spanky’s bridle, managing at one and the same time to distract Kate’s wrath from Henry (“Yes, dear?” she said in the affectionate tones she used with her favorite paying students) and to prove her major contention, that her time was precious and Henry owed it to her to stay around acting helpful.

  “Henry,” she said, and he turned immediately, dropping his bicycle on the grass and running for the hand riveter. She had not, at least, asked to inspect the old black saddle bag behind the seat of his vehicle, where he’d stored three peanut butter sandwiches, the remains of a box of raisins, a can of salted nuts, six sugar cookies, two cans of soda, his rain poncho, and a somewhat rusted pocketknife he’d found three weeks ago in one of the tack trunks. She had not frisked him, thereby discovering the folded one-dollar bills and handfuls of coins that comprised his travel fund, and the fact that he was wearing three layers of clothes (two shirts, a pair of shorts, clean pajamas, and a pair of slacks, as well as his largest shoes with two pairs of socks). Nor had she looked narrowly into his eyes and espied the imminence of his escape, as he’d feared she could. When he ran off to get the leather-working tool, therefore, he was elated rather than let down. T
he initial escape, perhaps the real escape, had been made. Pedaling away would now be a somewhat routine formality.

  And besides, her strictures on the bicycle decided him about the family class. Departure, henceforth a foregone conclusion, could be put off another day. After delivering the riveter, he went to the hotdog stand, where the vendor, only just setting up but understanding Henry with perfect wordlessness, took out a moment and made him a celebratory hotdog. Mustard, catsup, relish, and kraut.

  He felt himself a monolith of detachment. He had never been quite this happy before. Judging by his parents and siblings, as well as the rest of the post-twelve-year-old world, he might never be so again. Food, clothes, money, wheels, raincoat: in the event of a disaster, he could easily float away to higher ground.

  “Hey, come here!” called John as Henry passed the barn door. “Go get me a cloth for my boots.” He stood just inside Teddy’s stall, looking traditionally resplendent: black hat, white stock, gold pin, black coat, buff breeches, liquid black boots. This was all wool stuff; their usual summer horse-show attire was more informal.

  “Gosh!” muttered Henry.

  John blushed. “Just get the cloth, would you? There’s one on the hay bale out there somewhere.”

  Henry handed it to him, and he led Teddy from the stall. The bandages had been found. And, apparently, washed. White beribboned braids, bleached saddle pad. Tail like cornsilk, hooves painted, whiskers and ears neatly trimmed. “He looks like the town fruit,” said Henry.

  “Oh, shut up. Now listen. When I get on, I want you to take that cloth and rub the toes of my boots and the back parts, wherever you see any dust. Got it?” He settled himself into the sunlit, burnished saddle. “That’s right. Now fold it up and run it over his head and neck and under his stomach. Stand up, you idiot.” He gave Teddy a jerk in the mouth. Henry did as he was told. “Wipe off his hocks.” Even these, usually stained no matter how hard you scrubbed, even these shone. Henry polished them and smoothed a few hairs of the tail. John was arranging himself, patting his breeches, puffing his stock. “O.K. I’m going to warm up. Go get me a hotdog and meet me back here in fifteen minutes.”