The storm door slammed behind me and we were out in the humid morning, dewy grass sparkling in the sunrise. The eastern sky was gold and pink; the western sky was piled up with distant clouds, thunderstorms over the Gulf of Mexico, their towering icy anvils catching the innocent pink of the dawn. They’d be trouble later; that was fine, that was later. For now — I turned into the center aisle of the barn, ready to greet my twelve — no, make that thirteen — eager children.
“Good morning!” I sang out, and they whinnied in reply, a glorious happy sound that lifted my spirits. No matter how tired I was, feeding horses their breakfast always made me feel loved and wanted and needed. I counted their adorable noses, each in their place. Everyone where they should be, everyone where I’d left them the night before, no broken stall doors or piles of manure in the aisle to indicate a runaway (I didn’t have the best door-latches on my aging Dutch doors). But this morning there were no calamities. Everyone had been good little boys and girls after I’d stopped doing my hourly night-checks. I smiled, full of good will towards men, and horses, and beagles. I strode into the barn with the confidence of a schoolmistress who knows that she is loved and that all of her pupils will ace their exams.
And then I saw the puddle.
And I stopped.
The horses stared at me, ears pricked, licking their noses and working their jaws in anticipation. A minute passed, and another, and their eager expressions darkened into confusion. It was breakfast-time, glorious breakfast-time — and I wasn’t making any move to feed them. Dynamo nickered encouragingly. You can do it!
Darling Dynamo. I’d do it the moment I could move my feet again. But first I had to get past that ominous, dark-colored pool just outside a stall door. Whose stall door? Who was in the box next to Monty? Suddenly, I couldn’t remember the order. Then Monty began to fling his head up and down, his classic pay me attention move, and the horse in the next stall was revealed.
“Mickey,” I squeaked. And then, louder, “Oh my sweet Jesus, what did you do, Mickey?”
All of the horses looked at me with the same perplexed expression, Mickey included. He was probably wondering what sort of place he had come to, where there wasn’t any breakfast. Was this some sort of equine torture camp, where humans came to the barn but didn’t give breakfast? He nickered, and the other horses took up the chant. The barn fairly rumbled with the songs of hungry horses, and still I stood there, my fingers tingling and bloodless, my feet rooted to the concrete floor. This was bad. This was bad.
Mickey’s eager face was red with blood.
I knew I had to get myself together, I had to feed, I had to clean that horse up. I had seen nasty wounds before. But this one was so visually appalling, I thought I must be entering some sort of shock. The cap of red spilling down over the new horse’s bright-white face, the gluey blood congealing on the ends of his eyelashes, making him blink owlishly, the drying pool darkening on the gray-white concrete in front of his stall door, a splash of lurid scarlet in a sea of earth tones. And the horse’s expression, the greatest contrast of all — he wasn’t concerned with anything but the lack of grain in his bucket.
Indeed, I was the only one in the barn who had a problem right now with Mickey’s face. Marcus was positively drooling at the sight of all that blood. It was only me, impassive, disinterested, hard-to-impress Jules, who was utterly horrified by my new charge’s disfigurement. My heart was thudding in my ears, my mouth was dry, my fingers were trembling — this was bad, Jules, bad, I kept hearing. Very very bad.
And just to make it all worse, the knowledge of all that hard work, all that coaxing and complimenting and late-night phone calls and mid-ride emails, was all for nothing. It was going to be impossible to hang onto this client now. I was going to lose this gorgeous horse, all for an extra hour’s sleep. If I’d just gotten up at 3:30 and done night-check, if I’d just gotten up at 4:30…
It still might have happened.
But it might not have.
“And Becky won’t be here today,” I remembered aloud, the horses’ ears flicking to the sound of my voice. Mickey whickered gently, encouragingly. He didn’t know me, but he obviously had confidence in me, that I could figure out how to get him his breakfast. He’d seen other humans do it before. It couldn’t be that hard. “It wouldn’t be,” I told him, “If I wasn’t in so completely over my head. Why’d you go and do this? You were going to save me, Mickey.”
I ran my dream farm on a payroll of one, if one was generous. In fact, I didn’t actually pay myself, except in ramen noodles, yogurt, and Diet Coke. There was, usually, just enough money coming in to feed the horses, cover the show bills, and pay for occasional emergencies. One more horse paying training fees, though, that would be huge. I had just barely begin to comprehend a reality in which I could afford help — a some guy to muck the stalls, drag the arena, and fix the constant scourge of broken fence-boards. I knew Becky wouldn’t stay forever, and once she finally left? It would all be on me, every day and every night. The very thought was exhausting, and I closed my eyes for a few sluggish heartbeats.
Passion shrieked in protest, and the rest of the barn followed suit. No napping on the job, lady!
I shook myself out of my inertia, stepped carefully over the blood on the pavement and reached up for Mickey’s halter, tugging it gently to bring his head closer to me. He responded by shaking his head, hard, to clear the red goop from his eyelashes, and in doing so splattered me all over with blood. My face, my tank top, my cut-off shorts, my bare legs — bloody droplets decorated all of me. I winced, closing my eyes to keep the blood out of them, and then looked down at my destroyed clothes. Good thing I had nowhere to be today. If I went to the feed store like this, the clerk would call the police. I looked like the prime suspect in a hatchet-murder.
Of course, my work uniform on mornings like this, when the barn chores were my problem, was not anything that a few quarts of horse-blood could ruin. These clothes were already long past the point of destruction. I shrugged it off and put my hand on his forehead, atop the whorl of hair between his eyes, and willed him to be still so that I could get an idea of what was going on under all that mess on his poll. He picked up his head, resentful, interested only in his missing breakfast. Down the aisle, Dynamo kicked his stall door, and Monty followed suit. “God,” I hissed, rubbing the horse’s forehead, sending a gentle shower of gray and white and red hairs onto my chest. “I can’t do this without a working student. This is insanity.”
A part-time working student. Only I would get into such a ridiculous situation.
When Becky had come to work for me, bright and eager and ready to show off her horsemanship skills, it had been the start of something beautiful. She moved into my guest room, she contributed to the Diet Coke fund, she watched reruns of Friends with me, although she did not think Ross and Rachel should have stayed together and this was a bigger problem for me than I could ever have admitted to her. And, significantly, she was around on mornings like this, when a horse was loose or a pipe had broken or there was a colic — someone to do the chores while I took care of the emergency.
“Whoa, Mickey-Mickey,” I whispered as the horse pulled away from my hand. “Let me see.” I worked my fingers through the thin hair, wondering what was missing. Something was off about his face.
Somewhere along the line, Becky had started to dislike me. I hadn’t done something right — I didn’t know what. Maybe she had just realized that I was a nobody.
“Whoa, poppy, pappito…” My fingers crept towards his ears. Something wasn’t right…
She had announced she was moving in with someone closer to Gainesville, because she was going back to school part-time. She could work for me part-time. She said this with a condescending air that I wasn’t imagining. She was willing to stay part-time, her tone said, because she knew I couldn’t get anyone to replace her. She pitied me. Not in so many words, but I could tell. I could always tell when someone looked down at me. I had a great deal of practice
.
I touched his ears, brushing at the crusty dried blood along their fuzzy edges. The ears were undamaged. Something else, though, something was bothering me. I chewed at my lip, preparing to touch the wound site behind his ears. Further down the barn aisle, Daisy whinnied her pretty neigh, and the others joined in all over again. If Becky had been here, they’d all have eaten already. I wouldn’t be trying to do a medical exam during breakfast-hour.
I might not have minded her being gone twice a week so much if she’d been going for something useful, like Equine Science, or pre-vet, or even International Business, for heaven’s sake. The eventing industry was growing, and someday we would catch up with the international jet-set crowd that wined and dined alongside arenas at show-jumping competitions. I would have liked an assistant who was ready to take on the challenges of selling million-dollar horse syndicates around the world. But she was doing an English degree.
English. Degree.
That really stung.
She felt that getting a completely useless piece of paper was preferable to working for me full-time. I knew I was still at the beginning of what was going to be an impressive career, and that someday she’d regret being so insulting as to continue her formal education instead of devoting herself to studying my home-grown equestrian wisdom, but any pleasure I took in Becky’s eventual failure and gnashing of teeth did not make it any easier for me to get work done on the days she had classes.
I slipped my fingers behind Mickey’s ears, gently probing the wound behind them, and sighed with relief when I encountered flesh immediately below the clotting blood. The whole thing seemed to be just a big abrasion — he was missing skin, for sure, but there weren’t any gashes, and it wasn’t anywhere near his skull or spine. Perhaps I could get through this. I closed my eyes and breathed thanks to all the deities in the universe, but mostly the eventing gods, who were capricious and easily angered.
I stepped back, my fingers red with unspeakably rich horse-blood, and took one more look. I looked around at the red drops decorating the floor, the stall door, the fronts of the stalls, me, and thought slightly enviously of my working student’s quiet, gore-free morning in an air-conditioned classroom, reading Jane Austen without a care in the world. She probably even had a latte on her desk.
Then I looked back at the horse, and I shook my head. Enjoy your latte, Becky. What was better than these horses, I thought. What was more important than this? I couldn’t imagine my life any other way than just like this, in the company of these creatures, smelling the scents of hay, wood shavings, manure, grass wet with morning dew. Delicate giants who needed me, and people like me, to put them first, now and forever.
“I’ll take care of you, sweetie,” I told Mickey.
Mickey eyed me beseechingly, blinking red tears. Breakfast. I smiled at him. And that’s when I realized what was missing.
His forelock.
I peered past his head and into the blood-strewn shavings of his stall. When it comes to Equine CSI, I’ve long been an expert investigator. Spend enough time with horses and you’ll learn to make short work of the crime scene. Their behaviors are all too obvious after a few years in the game. And Mickey’s case is easily solved.
There’s a gap in the stall wall — that would be where he kicked two boards out of the wall between his stall and the next one, and then, foolishly, shoved his head through the narrow gap he’d created. He’d been curious to meet his new neighbor. That was understandable. Horses like to know who they live with.
Unfortunately, his neighbor was that little devil on hooves, Passion. The horrible pony probably came after him with yellow teeth bared, and in panic Mickey would have whipped his head out of that narrow space, not very cleanly, leaving behind the skin on the top of his head.
And his forelock.
I leaned back again and looked over at Passion, who had his chin resting on the stall door. He was watching me with round brown eyes. Anyone who didn’t know him would have thought he was cute. “You bit him, didn’t you?”
He gazed back at me guilelessly and let out a shrill whinny.
“You fat piece of crap,” I told him.
But he only pricked his ears and worked his jaw. Hint, hint, I’m hungry.
That’s the problem with ponies: they don’t care. You can’t chastise a pony. They have an extra empty stomach where their conscience ought to be.
“I’m going to send you back to Miss Your Dream Farm Awaits and she can stick you in her pool-house until she figures out what to do with you. Let her foist you off on one of her clients as part of their new dream farm.” Passion’s child-owner was the daughter of one of Ocala’s leading million-dollar-farm realtors. Unfortunately, her ability to sell acreage and marble mansions did not translate into an ability to make good pony decisions. Little Caitlin got dumped in the show-ring, and Passion got dumped with me. “I knew you were a mistake.”
Passion laid back his ears and showed me his overbite. Then he kicked the stall door for emphasis.
I shook my head. I had to get a hold of myself. I was a professional. I could handle this.
First things first. The best place to start is at the beginning. Et cetera, et cetera. I gazed at the blinking, red-capped horse before me, and he whickered once more. “You’re right,” I told him. “Breakfast.”
And while I was in the feed room getting the breakfast buckets together, I’d see if I had any oral tranquilizers. Among the things I would have to learn about this horse was how well he handled having his ouchies cleaned and treated.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I was resolved to get on with my day, but still I loafed for a moment. I couldn’t help but stand and gaze at Passion for a few moments more, playing out his crimes in my head, examining what he represented about my farm and my business.
After all, I really wanted to blame the pony. Isn’t that what ponies are for, anyway? Little scheming scapegoats, the gremlins of any self-respecting stable, systematically tearing down the fences that contain much larger horses, breaking into feed rooms that by any normal evolutionary standard should have required opposable thumbs to enter, and leaving scrapes and scars on the pristine show horses they are enlisted to serve as companions and babysitters.
But since I knew all that, of course I was to blame. I shouldn’t have put Mickey next to Passion. The little brat seemed to think he was a stallion who had to protect the stable against all comers. He welcomed Mickey into the barn the only way he knew how, by picking a fight through the slits in the wall boards. I could see it all playing out like a movie in my mind’s eye. He’d stamped and squealed and kicked and finally Mickey, utterly incensed, had kicked the wall and broken the boards and now…
Stupid, stupid, stupid, I berated myself. And now?
Now I had to deal with blood and wooden splinters and a missing forelock, that was now.
I leaned my forehead against the cold metal bars of Mickey’s stall front for a moment. Just for a few minutes, I needed the tranquility of spirit that comes from thoroughly beating oneself up.
My failure to proceed directly to the feed room was met with a crescendo of whinnies from the disbelieving horses. They were not interested in my inner peace, no matter what the bestselling zen guides to women and horsemanship would have you believe. They were interested in their stomachs. Horses are always interested in their stomachs.
“Alright, alright!” I shouted, and stomped off towards the feed room. I was alone in a barn, shouting at horses. Living the dream.
In the feed room, I set to work, slinging sweet feed into buckets with mechanical precision, angling the big metal scoop so that I could accurately send grain from the storage bin into the buckets I had lined up in neat rows across the floor. Call it a horsewoman’s party trick, but I have always been very good at throwing grain.
Marcus watched me from the doorway, hound dog eyes sorrowful and starving, hoping that I’d miss a throw so he could lick up the molasses-coated oats.
Slopping feed witho
ut thinking is truly a gift, especially if a person enjoyed berating oneself as much as I did, because I now had ample free space in my brain to continue considering what a fool I was to stick a horse next to Passion — or even to allow Passion in my barn for another moment — or, really, to ever have accepted Passion into the barn in the first place.
The truth was (I uncapped the bucket of electrolytes) I had never been a fan of ponies. I had simply been trying to fill the barn up, get another client on the books. I had a bad habit of doing that (I sprinkled neon pink salt over the feed buckets) and the fact was, I was probably a terrible businessperson who would never make a dime at this game and end up losing everything.
Cheerful thoughts like that were the fuel of my days.
I took down the vitamin E and selenium tub and started doling it out to my hardest workers. Passion was not amongst them.
To put it in the bleakest and truest of terms: Passion was a black pit of a trainee. His owner paid the bills, but the profit was to be made on my commission when he sold. And he wasn’t going to be sold anytime soon.
That was because Passion was an attractive pony but an unpleasant ride, with the wide-jowled face and swaggering attitude of a gelding left a stallion a few years too long. I’d made a staggering misjudgment in taking him as a trainee. Why didn’t the silence of the other trainers clue me in, that day at the show, when Leighann was trying to wrestle the kicking, biting little miscreant into the trailer, while Caitlin cried in the truck? I’d thought I was so clever. I’ll fix his wagon, I told her. I’ll get him in order and sell him for a tidy profit, I told her.
Ambition: (The Eventing Series Book 1) Page 6