by John Muncie
“Roy and Theo were racehorses?” asked Tug. “Real racehorses? Like Secretariat?”
“Not like Secretariat—that’s the problem,” she said. “If they had been, they wouldn’t be here. These guys broke down. Don’t get me started on the racing industry and its greed, taking two-year-old babies and racing them into the ground. Their bones aren’t even completely formed and they’re pounded into the track. The ones that don’t break down early run their hearts out until they can’t go fast enough to win. Then they’re shipped to junkier and junkier racetracks until the Thoroughbred Rescue League finds them half-starved. I take in some of the league’s horses and rehabilitate them and then find homes for them. At least that’s the theory. But every once in a while, one of them gets stuck in my heart. These two are lifers here. I could never get rid of them.”
After the hands-on anatomy lesson, Alyssa attached Theo’s halter to a long green webbed line. As Tug waited by the fence, she led the horse into the open pasture.
“I’m going to lunge him—that means make him walk, trot, and canter around me—so you can see how he moves,” Alyssa said. “You can’t draw them if you don’t know how their bodies work.”
Alyssa began to slowly pivot and Theo, on the other end of the green line, started circling around her. For three revolutions he lumbered along like a fifty-cent-a-ride pony with his ears lopped back and his head hung low.
“Hard to believe he was on the track,” said Tug, leaning, chin on hands, against the top board of the fence.
Alyssa smiled. “Just watch.”
Holding the line with her left hand, she called out, “Trrrot.” Theo’s ears pricked forward, his head snapped to attention, and he immediately launched into a kind of sprightly jog.
“Wow,” Tug said. “Do the kids at school obey you like that?”
“I wish,” said Alyssa, as she and Theo continued turning, the green line tracing out the area of a circle. “That’s the beauty of horses. They listen and don’t talk back. Watch his shoulders move, see how long and sweepy they are? That way he can cover a lot of ground fast.”
The sound of her voice waxed and waned, as she turned and Theo circled, churning up clods of dirt as he passed Tug’s spot by the fence. “You’re seeing three hundred years of breeding at work here. It all started when the hotbloods—the Byerly Turk, Darley Arabian, and the Godolphin Barb—were brought to England to breed with carriage horses for speed. Watch this.”
In the same firm tone as she’d said, “Trot,” she called out, “Caaan-ter.” The horse pushed back on his haunches and rocked forward into a gentle lope. “Count the beats as his legs strike the ground. It’s one-two-three, one-two-three, up and down like a sine wave. Feels just like a rocking horse. You’ll see.”
Tug forced a casual smile and nodded. You’ll see? What did she mean by that? He’d rather wrestle a bear than get on a horse, especially this one, which had moved from amiable lope to serious gallop as he raced around Alyssa, squealing and kicking up his hind legs every few seconds.
“He’s just having fun,” she said, laughing. Then she gave the line three sharp pulls and singsonged in a low, soothing voice: “Easy, boy. Easy. Easy. Settle down, now. Settle down . . .”
It wasn’t until Theo slowed to a walk and then stopped that Tug realized the exhibition had been wasted on him. He hadn’t been studying the horse, he’d been studying the blond woman with the wild colors and dirty boots make a 1,200-pound creature do her bidding using just her voice. She had held on to the green line with one hand and animated her lesson with the other, occasionally glancing over her shoulder at him as she turned. She seemed happy there, as if the pivot point were the center of the world. Her smile narrowed her slightly downturned eyes; her cheeks blushed red from the exertion and the sun.
Alyssa’s command impressed Tug. But not nearly as much as the joy and energy she brought to the simple job of running a horse around in a circle. It reminded him of his art school days when even the simplest assignment was new and fun and everyone was powered by possibilities. He wondered if he could learn to capture that feeling with a 2B pencil.
When the lesson was over, Alyssa took the horses back to the pasture, gave them a handful of carrots, and shooed them away. Theo took off at a gallop, once again squealing and bucking. Roy followed, without the shenanigans.
“Aren’t they beautiful?” Alyssa sounded like a thirteen-year-old girl with a crush on a boy band. “I could watch them all day. I can see why you want to draw them.”
Tug hesitated. Beauty had nothing to do with it. He needed an exercise in movement and musculature, a way to sharpen his eye, tone his technique, enforce discipline. He wanted to train his hands so that they, like Leonardo’s, would obey his vision. Horses were an artist’s way of practicing scales. They weren’t the actual music.
But he couldn’t ruin Alyssa’s enthusiasm. “Extraordinary,” he said.
“You’ll be riding one in no time.”
“I don’t—I don’t think,” Tug stammered.
“Don’t worry. I’ve taught all kinds of Limeys to ride, even Marius, though he swears he rode in the ‘old country.’ Abbi rides with me all the time now, didn’t she tell you? And she’d never been on a horse either when she first got here. It’s easy.”
“Easy?” Tug said. “There’s no way you’re getting me on that brown monster. Maybe . . . maybe Roy. We’ll see. But one step at a time. First let me draw them.”
He was about to suggest another meeting, but Alyssa beat him to it. “Then you’ll have to come tomorrow. How’s nine o’clock? I’ll supply the coffee. You supply the pencils and paper.”
It was afternoon when Tug, once more in sandals, headed down the dirt drive. As he turned onto Limespring Hollow Road, he looked back toward Finally Farm. Against the hills, a side of the yellow farmhouse peeked out from behind the trees. In the mid-distance was his new friend, Roy, looking even shinier against the light green pasture grass. Overhead, a little herd of puffy clouds trotted across the wide acreage of blue sky.
He ran his fingers back through his hair, wondering if he’d gotten everything reversed. Maybe Leonardo hadn’t created beauty through technique; maybe technique simply allowed him to be a conduit for the beauty that was already there. What if Leonardo thought of horses the same way Alyssa did? What if his sketches were little acts of appreciation?
Maybe I’m wrong about beauty having nothing to do with it, Tug thought. Maybe beauty has everything to do with it.
CHAPTER 9
“I’m giving horse lessons now.” Alyssa was talking to Darryl on the phone. He was calling from San Diego.
“So what’s new about riding lessons?” Darryl said.
“No, not riding lessons. Horse lessons. There’s this new artist at Limespring who wants to learn to draw them.” She could hear Darryl shuffling papers on the other end.
“Let me guess, you’re not charging her anything, right? Another part of the Brown family Limespring charity?”
“It’s a him and let’s not start this again, okay? We get a lot from Limespring. This is the least I can do.”
“We?”
“Yes, ‘we.’ What about the mural in the barn and the mosaic floor and the whirligig? Do I need to go on?”
She could still hear the papers rustling.
“No,” he said. “Spare me. You’re right, let’s not get into it again. I’ve got to meet someone for dinner in a few minutes. By the way, did the Amerigas guy come to check for the leak?”
For the next few minutes they went over Darryl’s to-do list of maintenance chores at the farm.
“Oh, one more thing,” he said. “I had to change my flight to the red-eye. I won’t be in till early Saturday morning. I’m going to go home and sleep and I’ll probably be too tired to come out there later.”
“Fine,” Alyssa said. Then they bid good-bye so quickly, she forgot to wish him a safe flight. She almost called him back, but then she thought about the rustling papers. She turned and he
aded for the front door instead of reaching for the phone.
A slight glow remained in the sky as she walked up the dirt drive to Limespring Hollow Road. It was her summer evening ritual, her good-night to the pastures and trees, her prayer before bedtime.
She liked the crunch of dirt and gravel beneath her clogs and she loved the little bursts of green light left behind by the starbugs as they scurried from her path. They weren’t really called starbugs. Alyssa had coined the name their first summer at Finally Farm and it had stuck.
As she’d walked along the drive that evening twelve years ago, a glimpse of chartreuse light caught her eye. She looked down, but the light was gone. She continued on and the same thing happened. She stopped again, squinting in the darkness at the ground around her feet. No light. She thought her eyes were playing tricks on her. She started off; another green flicker. This time, she bent down and rubbed her hand against the gravel. A small bug hustled away in a huff, flashing its little green warning light as it went.
She stood up and made another tentative step forward. More flashes. Three more steps, quickly, one-two-three. Lots more flashes.
She ran back to the house to tell Darryl about her discovery. “Come outside, I have to show you these starbugs,” she’d said. “When you walk down the road, they light up. Whole constellations of them! It’s like being sandwiched between Milky Ways.”
She’d grabbed his hand and led him to the driveway. “Oh, I know what they are,” he said as bugs flashed around them, “they’re glowworms, Phengodes plumosa.”
Alyssa loved that Darryl could identify and classify, that he knew the Latin names for things. It made her feel as if she were part of a secret order: the Society of Phylum and Genus.
“Say it again,” she said and threw her arms around his neck.
“Phengodes plumosa,” he said and she pushed him down onto the grass, where they made love by the light of the stars and the glow of the starbugs.
Alyssa couldn’t recall the last time she and Darryl had gone starbug gazing. Still, each time she returned for the summer and caught the first glimpse of green light, it brought back that night of discovery. And for a moment—in the dash of time it took for the bug to issue its phosphorescent warning—everything was as it had been. For a moment, the gap inside her wasn’t there.
Over the years, Alyssa had shown the starbugs to many of the Limespring fellows. Invariably, they were a big hit. Starbugs found their way into a cycle of hexameter sonnets called “Illuminations of the Third Desire” by a Seattle poet who was so intrigued he camped out in her driveway. They inspired the use of phosphorescent pigments in a series of experimental paintings, called Starbugs 1-13, that showed at the Corcoran Museum in Washington, D.C. And Marius, the Falstaffian Czech artist, swore that starbugs were the idea behind his Cohesive Particles of the Meanderer, No. 37, the quirky installation he’d put up next to the Limespring studios.
But Alyssa’s favorite starbug creation was something else. One night when Roz was seven, she’d gone outside with a flashlight and an empty pickle jar. She had refused to tell her mother what she was doing. “Let her go,” Darryl had said, “she’s got an important job.” And he winked at his daughter.
Ten minutes passed and Roz was still outside in the dark by herself. “I think I better check on her,” Alyssa had said, but Darryl said no. “Quit worrying, she’s fine. It could be a while.”
Finally, after nearly a half hour, Roz returned wearing a big smile, her left hand hidden behind her back. She edged around to the stairs so Alyssa couldn’t see. Then she bounded up to her room, calling out, “Mommy, I have a surprise for you. I’ll be down in a while.”
She soon returned, still hiding something behind her back. “Come outside,” she said and with her free hand pulled Alyssa out the screen door.
After a few steps into the darkness, Roz stopped and held out her hand. “Here, Mommy, starbug earrings. I made them for you.”
There in her palm, a little place no bigger than a hummingbird’s nest, were two silver-dollar-sized pieces of paper, each with a safety pin attached.
Alyssa bent close to Roz’s gift. In the light from the open door behind them, she could see that her daughter had glued a single bug to the middle of each piece of paper and surrounded it with a few sprigs of something.
“Oh, I love them, sweetie,” she said. “What are these other decorations?”
“It’s grass, so the starbugs don’t get hungry,” Roz said. “Get close so I can show you how they work.”
Alyssa knelt down and Roz attached the safety pins to the gold hoops Alyssa was wearing.
“Now shake your head so they light up.”
Roz placed her fingers on Alyssa’s cheeks—her touch was feathery and a little bit sticky from Elmer’s glue—and guided her head back and forth. As much as Alyssa’s head shook, the bugs stayed dark. Roz started to cry and Alyssa almost joined her. Finally she gathered her daughter in her arms and told her in ten different ways how much she loved her new earrings. Then, because she couldn’t possibly tell Roz the earrings had died, she explained how starbugs often got tired after a long night of flashing and needed a comfortable place to rest before they could flash again.
In a drawer upstairs they found a white jewelry box that Alyssa insisted was the perfect place for starbugs to sleep. Together she and Roz removed the slender gold chain inside and replaced it with the earrings.
Roz’s starbug earrings were still inside the white box, still inside the top drawer. The white paper circles had yellowed over the years like a set of tea-stained teeth. Little parts of the bugs had fallen off—one was missing its hind legs, the other its head. Their food, the blades of bright green grass, had turned to straw.
As Alyssa walked down the drive, she saw Theo and Roy, nibbling tufts of grass on the pasture side of the fence. “Hey, fellas,” she said. Both their heads went up and Theo walked up to her to have his face scratched.
Horses always made Alyssa feel better, and she needed a lift. This evening, she’d pulled out the starbug earrings. They only made her feel worse. Roz wouldn’t be at the farm at all this summer. Her internship was going to last three months. Alyssa hadn’t wanted to agree to it, but Darryl and Roz had ganged up on her.
“Time to cut the umbilical cord, Mom,” Roz had said. “Besides, this could help my career.”
“What career? You’re seventeen years old,” Alyssa had said.
“Eighteen in three weeks, and I’ve told you a million times, if I intern with Uncle Ron, I’ll be the only freshman with real architectural experience.”
Alyssa knew she’d lose. And most of her knew it was the right decision. A summer working with Darryl’s brother would be the best thing for Roz. She mostly knew that.
Alyssa reached the pavement of Limespring Hollow Road and turned back. Only her bedroom light was on at the farmhouse. She’d braced herself for great tsunamis of sadness to overwhelm her this summer. Little wavelets started coming during Roz’s ju-nior year in high school, when she got a brochure in the mail from Johns Hopkins University. A year later, Alyssa found herself crying at the stupidest things—walking past the college dorm-room displays at Target, reading about a Mr. Rogers exhibit at the Smithsonian, tripping over Roz’s ridiculous platform shoes.
But as the school year and Roz’s childhood came to an end, Alyssa found herself settling into the inevitability of her daughter’s leaving home. The loneliness she felt walking through the farm’s empty spaces was balanced by a profound gratitude that, this time, the natural order was running its course.
And now there was a different natural order to consider. This wasn’t only Roz’s first summer away from the farm, this was the first summer Alyssa would be there by herself.
It hadn’t surprised her when Darryl said he wouldn’t be coming out the next weekend. He’d already told her he’d only show up occasionally before he left for California again in July. She’d just said, “Okay, do what you have to do.”
She k
new he’d been coming to the Follies the past few years just for Roz, to keep up the charade of a unified Brown family. With Roz in Chicago, there was no reason for Darryl’s show of family alliance and forced half-smiles at the Follies foolishness.
Secretly, Alyssa was happy he wouldn’t be around much. She wouldn’t have to put up with his complaints about the swarms of ladybugs or bad wiring or sluggish plumbing. She knew her love for the farm made him feel like an outsider, a jilted suitor. And, in a way, he was. Over the years, she’d found more comfort in the four walls and fifty acres than in his arms.
In her most desperate times, when she didn’t think she could hurt any harder, she’d tried to turn to Darryl. But he told her he couldn’t handle her “big Broadway emotions.”
“They don’t leave any room for me, Alyssa,” he’d said. “You’re not the only one who’s having a hard time.”
Each time she drove up Limespring Hollow Road and saw the little yellow house, she felt the same way as the first time she’d seen it: like she’d returned from a long journey. Even before they’d signed the mortgage papers, she was telling friends the only way she’d leave it was horizontally, in a pine box.
But Darryl had never felt that way about the farm. A mild interest became indifference, then dislike. Once when they’d turned onto Limespring Hollow Road and he’d made another sarcastic remark about entering “the Redneck Nation,” Alyssa had made him stop the car and let her out. She’d walked to the house alone and wouldn’t talk to him for the rest of the day.
She’d tried to find projects and activities they could do together—gardening, hiking, building the barn. But he didn’t like the outdoors. He preferred reading his journals or playing tennis, and the nearest tennis courts were thirty minutes away.
She’d also tried to get him involved in Limespring, but he didn’t like the fellows and the fellows found him irrelevant. His disdain for them turned seating arrangements at farmhouse dinner parties into a kind of chess game. Inevitably, whoever Alyssa sat next to him would chat until politeness had been served, then turn for the rest of the evening to a friendlier, livelier guest.