True Blue

by Jane Smiley

  It was a silly trick, and one that most people wouldn’t notice, but it seemed like a trick that was suited to Blue and his kind nature—I wanted to show him a carrot, and then have him look away from it in order to get it.

  When I first started with this trick, I did it partly because it was the only one I could think of. Horses we had seen did lots of tricks—they reared on command, they bowed, they lay down, or they jumped up on pedestals. That horse on TV, Mr. Ed, moved his lips as if he was talking. Once when I was pretty small, Daddy and Mom took me to a rodeo where Roy Rogers made six or seven palominos do a bunch of tricks. But now I had a broken arm and the ground was muddy and somehow something quieter seemed better. I let Blue trot around the pen for a minute—the footing in here was less slippery than in the pasture, and he looked like he needed to loosen up. I took the bag to the middle of the pen and set it at my feet. I had one piece of carrot in my right hand. I was no longer wearing the sling, so I kept my left hand down at my side, but I didn’t have anything in it. While Blue trotted and then walked around, I wondered how I was going to do this.

  Blue came over. I stood there. He sniffed my shoulder first, and then my waist, and finally he sniffed my hand, and of course he knew the carrot was in there, but I didn’t move. He nosed my hand once, then stretched his head and neck and checked my other hand. I waited. He waited, not doing much, and then one of the mares snorted, and he looked in that direction. Right then, I said, “Good Blue,” and I slipped the carrot between his lips. He started chewing it, and I picked up the bag and walked away. I went to another corner of the pen and stood. After a moment, Blue followed me.

  Now he was interested in the carrots—he knew I had them and that he could get one—so the first thing he tried was to be a little pushier than he had been before, but I didn’t do anything; I just stood there with the carrot in my hand without making any moves while he nudged my hand and then my other hand, and then my shoulder. However, being Blue, he didn’t push too hard—a horse like Jack or a horse like Amazon might be more aggressive, but not Blue. Finally, he dropped his head and flopped his ears. I waited. This time, what attracted his attention was Rusty—she came around the house. As soon as he looked in her direction, I said, “Good Blue,” again, and slipped the carrot between his lips. As soon as he was chewing, I walked away to another part of the pen. I knew Daddy would say, “How in the world is this useful?” and I couldn’t have answered. But it was starting to be fun. Blue followed me.

  We did exactly this same thing four more times—he looked for the carrot and didn’t get it, and then as soon as he looked at something else, I said, “Good Blue,” gave him the carrot, and walked away. The last time, I only walked two steps, so all he had to do was pivot on his haunches to be with me. Six times in all, and I was ready to do it lots of times—I had no idea how long it would take Blue to make the connection between looking away and getting a carrot. I was having fun. It was still two hours until it got dark, and what else was there to do? I wanted to pet him, but I didn’t want to confuse him, so I made myself not pet him, but just stand there.

  On the seventh time, he did it. He was a smart horse. He looked at me, then he looked at my hand, and then he looked away. There was nothing out there to look at—no noises, no movements, and his ears didn’t prick in that direction. I said, “Good Blue,” and slipped him the carrot. This time his lips took it. That’s how I knew he understood. After that first time, it was easy. I walked a few steps, stood quietly, Blue looked at me and then looked away and waited for me to give him the carrot. I got to where I made him wait a few seconds, just to see if he understood what he was supposed to do. He did—he kept looking away until I gave him the carrot.

  It is hard to describe how it felt to teach Blue this trick. It was like having him read my mind, but also like reading his mind. For me, he was the only horse in the world at that moment, and I felt like I was the only being in his world, too. The other horses were unimportant, Rusty was nothing, we didn’t hear Daddy come out on the back porch, there was no ghost, or even the memory of a ghost. There was just this beautiful gray horse who seemed like he was about to say something, who seemed like he could do anything, if only you knew how to ask him.

  I walked over to the gate, where I had draped the lead rope over the fence, and I snapped the lead rope on his halter. Then I opened the gate and walked out and over to the barn. It was only there that I began to pet him and groom him and make a big fuss. I wanted that thing we did in the pen, even if it was a little thing, or because it was a little thing, to stay pure in his mind—or maybe in my mind.

  Lead Rope

  Flannel Bandages and Cotton Sheets

  Chapter 19

  AT SUPPER, DADDY WAS FEELING MUCH BETTER, AND IN FACT, HE said that he was fine. He ate plenty and was in a good mood, though he was still wearing his robe. He said, “So what were you doing out there with your horse?”

  “Teaching him a trick.”

  “What trick?”

  “To look away in order to get a treat.”

  “You get him to do it?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s cute.”

  “Did you ever teach a horse a trick?”

  “Not since we were kids. When I was eleven and Luke was thirteen, we taught Luke’s horse to add and subtract.”

  Mom said, “How’d you do that?”

  “Well, we taught him to paw the ground until Luke pushed his hat up. Then we would stop. It was a harder trick than it looked like, though.”

  Mom said, “Why was that?”

  Daddy was already smiling. “Well, especially in the subtraction, Luke and I would come up with the wrong answers. So the horse looked like he hadn’t properly learned his tables.”

  We all laughed.

  So, I thought when I was lying in bed that night, a trick isn’t a big deal in lots of ways. But that moment when Blue understood what he was supposed to do, that felt like a big deal. And I fell asleep without thinking about the ghost at all.

  On Tuesday, it was raining again, and Mom called the school at lunchtime to tell me to come home on the bus, because Jane had canceled the lessons. That was fine with me, since I wanted to see if Blue remembered his trick from the day before. But as the afternoon went by, I got to feeling worse and worse, and when I got off the bus, it was all I could do to drag myself through the gate and up the front steps. I opened the door, walked inside, and sat down on the bottom step. It took me a long time even to close the door. I just slumped there with my eyes half closed, only partly aware of Spooky sitting in his box, staring at me. I think I might have said, “Go ahead and stare, Spooky. I’m too tired to care.”

  Mom must have been at the store, because when she came in, she had bags in her arms. She said, “Uh-oh,” and walked past me, but then she came back and sat me up on the step and took my jacket off. I felt about three years old. But that wasn’t bad. She said, “Did you throw up yet?”

  I shook my head.

  She felt my forehead with the palm of her hand and then my cheeks with the back of her hand. She said, “Not much.” But I didn’t feel feverish, or even sick to my stomach. I felt like Rip Van Winkle, and ready to sleep for a hundred years.

  Here are the things I remember from that night and the next day:

  Me lying on my back in my bed, with the room half dark, and Mom sticking the thermometer in my mouth.

  Me opening my eyes and seeing that the light was on next to my bed, but not being able to reach it.

  The sound of rain.

  Mom putting a cool washcloth on my forehead, with Daddy standing behind her looking at me.

  Spooky sitting on my chest.

  Blue turning his head away from me, then toward me, then away from me again.

  Daddy opening the window in my room, and the Lady floating in.

  Me sitting up, and then lying down again because I didn’t care about the Lady, I was so tired.

  The door opening, and the light being on in the hall.r />
  Kyle Gonzalez talking French, but not saying anything I could understand.

  Barbie Goldman saying, “You’re kidding!” then laughing and throwing a tennis ball at the wall of the gym.

  My room being completely dark, so dark that I couldn’t see anything, and me yelling something.

  Mom feeling my head and saying, “Her hair is really damp.”

  Blue walking around me, once to the left and once to the right.

  Spooky sitting on Blue’s back in a green field.

  Mom putting another cool washcloth on my forehead, then, sometime later, making me sit up and put my hands in a pot of cold water.

  The room full of sunlight.

  A glass of lupine sitting on the table next to my bed.

  The fragrance of the lupine.

  Feeling hungry, but falling asleep about halfway through a bowl of chicken rice soup.

  Nothing.

  And then I woke up.

  It was almost dark, and I had no idea what day it was, or how long I had been in my room. I felt totally fine, and sat up, and put my feet on the floor. The rug next to my bed had been moved, and the floor was cool against the soles of my feet. It felt good. I reached over and turned on the light by my bed. My hand had a cast around it, so I twisted and reached with my right hand. That hand worked fine. The light came on and I saw that my room was very neat. I got up and opened the door. The hallway of our house looked bright, and all the corners were very sharp, almost sparkling. I was unbelievably hungry. I went to the bathroom, and then ran down the stairs. Spooky sprang up when he saw me, and gave me a sassy hiss, then jumped on his knotted rope and killed it.

  In the kitchen, Mom was reading a knitting pattern. She looked up at me as soon as I walked through the door and said, “She is ris’n.”

  I said, “I am so hungry!”

  Mom closed her knitting book. “No wonder.”

  “What day is it?”

  “Wednesday.”

  I said, “Is that all?”

  “You sound disappointed.”

  “It feels like it should be next year.”

  “That’s what your dad said when he revived.”

  “How many times did I wake up in the night, though?”

  “Only once after I took off your clothes.”

  “Did you give me chicken rice soup?”

  She shook her head. “But I can give you some now.”

  I decided that Spooky, Blue, Barbie, and Kyle hadn’t been in my room, either. But the glass of lupine was there.

  I could see the horse pastures out the kitchen windows and Rusty, too, coming out of the barn. She sat and looked first to the left and then to the right. I said, “Where’s Daddy?”

  “He’s out riding Amazon. But the ground is so wet, he was just going to ride her down the road a ways and back. That’s what we did with Foxy and Jefferson.”

  “Did you ride Foxy?”

  Mom nodded. She said, “I was good.” Then she said, “And that’s what Daddy and Danny did when they took Lincoln and Happy out, too.”

  I couldn’t believe it. I said, “When was that?”

  “First thing this morning.”

  “Did they come back—”

  “With any bruises or black eyes?”

  I nodded.

  Now she grinned. “Not a one. Let me make that soup.”

  She also made me toast. I ate two bowls of soup and three pieces of toast and two hours later, I was ready for supper, which was a baked chicken and some rice.

  But it wasn’t as easy as that. After I had called Gloria, who was in some of my classes, and Stella, who was in another one, and gotten our assignments, I got a headache in the midst of working on the new book we were reading, Ethan Frome, and went right over to my bed and fell asleep.

  But not for the whole night. I woke up again, just as I had before, bright and happy. The room sparkled the way the hallway had—I could see the edges of the window as if they were carved out of light. My shelves in the corner across from the bed were dim and bright at the same time—I felt as though I could read the titles on the spines of the books even though I could barely see the books. It was as if my eyes had grown bigger, and for a moment I thought, This is how horses see in the dark, and it’s true that their eyes are so big that they probably make things out better than we do, especially at a distance.

  It was twenty after two by my bedside clock. Not good. I turned on my side and closed my eyes, but every part of my body was saying time to get up and go; sleep was over.

  Mom has always said that one of the great things about me is that I’ve been a good sleeper since I was four months old. “Put her down, pat her on the back, and she didn’t make a peep until morning.” This was in contrast to Danny, who was up every two or three hours until he was almost two. And he was an early riser. There was a story about him from when he was three—Daddy heard something that woke him up, and as he opened his eyes, he saw Danny running past his bedroom door. He decided he’d better get up and see what was going on, and as soon as he sat up, he put his foot on a broken egg. When he went, “Ahh! Ugh!” Mom turned over in bed and put her hand in another broken egg right in the middle of the blanket. There were twelve eggs cracked all over the house they had then, and, as Mom always says, “It was only five-thirty in the morning.”

  Another time, Danny had climbed a fence and fallen, biting his tongue when he hit. They took him to the doctor and got stitches, and the next morning, he woke Mom and showed her the thread he had pulled out of his tongue. That time, the sun wasn’t even up yet.

  But me, I was perfect. I was such a good sleeper that I went down at eight like a tree falling in the forest and hardly moved all night. But after my twenty-four-hour virus, my body said, “Those days are gone.”

  I sat up and went to the window. I didn’t feel that the room was cold. There was no moon, so I couldn’t see the horses very well. The dark grass and the dark trees hid them, and since the window was closed, I couldn’t hear them, either. I could see the angled bulk of the barn and the curve of the arena fence next to that. I could see the dark hillside, the way it rose and undulated, but mostly I could see stars and stars and stars. Usually, the sky looks flat and the stars look scattered across it, small, smaller, and smallest, but tonight, the sky looked deep, and the multitude of stars looked far, farther, and farthest. I really could see what they told us in science, that the sky bent around and enveloped the earth. The more I stared, the more I could imagine those light-years Mr. Ramirez was always talking about.

  When I looked back at the clock, it was a little after two-thirty. I saw that it was going to be a long night. But I didn’t want to turn on the light for some reason. If you are going to be wide awake in the middle of the night for what felt like the first time ever (but not really the first, of course—there were times that I woke up to worry about something and then went back to sleep, but this was not about worrying), then you could not do homework or read a book you had already read six times. You had to do something special. It was just that I couldn’t think what to do. I lay back in my bed and stared at the ceiling.

  Then I remembered that moment when we came home Sunday night, when we pulled through the gate and saw Blue in the pasture, where Danny had left him. Just like tonight, it was very dark outside because of the weather and the time of year, but there was Blue, glowing gray in the gloom, his neck arched and his tail switching, his ears pricked, and his nostrils flared, my horse, looking as beautiful as maybe it was possible for a horse to look. I lay there. My ceiling was so dark that I couldn’t see the water stain that Daddy kept saying we had to fix, but in my mind I could see Blue, dapply and shining. I decided to go find out what the horses were doing.

  I had sense enough to be sneaky and quiet. At the very least, if Mom heard me moving around, she would get up and ask me how I felt, but I felt great, and I didn’t feel like talking. I slid on my jeans and put a sweatshirt over my pajama top. I picked up some socks—whether they matched,
I didn’t know. I opened my bedroom door veeerrrrry slowly and peeked into the hallway. Mom and Daddy’s door was open, but I tiptoed past it and down the stairs, one step at a time. No creaking. I even got past Spooky, who was sound asleep in his sweater with his paw over his face. I thought I got past Rusty, since I heard no movements on the front porch, but I was wrong. She startled me when I opened the back door—she was standing there with her ears up and her tail wagging. But she didn’t make a sound and neither did I.

  I stepped into my rubber boots. Only after I was in them did I think about spiders, but nothing bit me. I tiptoed across the porch and down the steps. Rusty was right in front of me. I had never been out of the house at this time of night before. It was darker than I thought it was going to be, but I had that same feeling, that I could see every edge and corner, even that I could see every single hair along Rusty’s back, distinct from every other hair. Or every dark, wet blade of grass. I looked up. The stars were even deeper than they had been through the window, layers and layers of stars beyond stars. I took a breath and then another one. The air was wet, but I could smell the grass and the lupine.

  My boots made a noise in the mud. I tried to go more quietly.

  The halters were buckled along the second bar of the gate. There was no one at the water troughs, no one scrounging for bits of hay. The horses were under the trees. It was too dark even to see Blue. And then he walked out into the open, his head stretched down and his tail swishing. He was walking carefully, because of the mud, and the dark-haired lady was lying across his back, her head and chest resting along his neck, and her legs in their black boots hanging down. Her arms were hanging, too, but her elbows were bent, and her hands were resting under her chin. He had no saddle, of course, but also no bridle—he was just walking along free. Her hair was so thick that it hid her face. I stared at the two of them, walking here and there. His coat was brighter than she was—she was wearing dark gray or black. Sometimes I could see her and sometimes I couldn’t. The other geldings, even Jack, were lost under the trees. I turned and looked at the mare pasture. The mares had gone down to the crick. I said, in a low voice, “Rusty! Rusty! Where are you?” but she was nowhere nearby. I realized that I was alone with Blue and the ghost. For the first time in days, my broken wrist began to throb.