Show Barn Blues

by Natalie Keller Reinert

  “It’s hard to believe, alright,” I said grimly.

  “Are you going to sell?” she asked suddenly.

  “This again? Who is telling everyone I’m selling?”

  “No one… it’s that big sign next door. I just wondered.”

  I started down the stairs. I had no need to stay up here all night, discussing real estate and waiting for fireworks not meant for me. “Go home, Kennedy.”

  She followed me down, the stairs protesting noisily. A few horses stopped chewing their hay and looked up, ears pricked at the late-night racket. “If I can do anything to help keep this place open, I’ll do it. You don’t know how much having Sailor here means to me.”

  I glanced back at her, my fingers on the light switch. “Yeah?”

  She stopped and watched me hopefully. “Yes.”

  “First off, stop taking my students on trail rides.”

  She swallowed and nodded tightly. “And what’s second? I mean it. I’ll do it.”

  An idea was forming in my mind, but it was too soon to tell if it was worth discussing with anyone. I’d have to sit down with a notebook and a calculator tonight, do the numbers, see if it was going to be the future or just a silly idea. Rodney was waiting for my answer. He was antsy to empty his barn and head to his new haven in north Florida. Where there were no fireworks, and no hotels, and no faux Tuscan hills, either.

  “I’ll let you know,” I promised. “Now go home.”

  I turned out the lights.

  CHAPTER TEN

  There was a crackle of electricity in the air. A late fall storm was slipping past the farm, with gusty winds causing the trees to thrash and flail. Distant rumbles of thunder shook the windows in their panes. It stayed too far away for rain, though. The cool drafts rushing down from the thunderhead’s icy upper reaches, high in the atmosphere, made riding more pleasant, though not more simple, than it had been as the hot summer sun refused to give up its holds. The horses got the wind up their tails and silliness ensued. They pranced through their slow gaits and crow-hopped through their fast ones.

  I was on Ivor, jumping combinations in-between helping Anna, who was getting a sort of mini-lesson on her gelding. Mason was a nice jumper, but his limit in scope was really showing today. I was dreading the conversation to come, when I finally told Anna that she was going to need a new horse if she expected to move up the levels. The way he was rattling the poles in their cups today, it looked as if she might not need me to clue her in on the fact.

  Finally, after pulling three consecutive rails in the triple combination, Anna called it a day. “We’ll watch you,” she said resignedly, slipping from the saddle so that she could hoist the poles back into place. Mason followed her like a dog, scarcely needing the security of the rein she’d looped around her arm. They were close, those two. Close like Kennedy and Sailor. A closeness I hadn’t shared with a horse since I was a child, with my own Sailor.

  I gathered up Ivor to send him towards the combination again, redirecting all my concentration towards getting him down to the fence at just the right spot. There was no time to worry about magical pony-girl relationships, or what might have been. The jumps loomed up before us, one two three, a vertical, a landing, a vertical, a stride, an oxer — big and wide and brightly colored. Anna stepped back from the second element and Mason backed with her, his legs in tandem with hers.

  I saw their motions from the corner of my eye, but my true focus was on the fences — and so was Ivor’s. He sprang over the first fence, me with him, the perfect spot. His fore-hooves touched the ground, and he was already gathering for the second fence, and Anna said “What the hell?” and I thought “What’s wrong? We’re perfect,” as Ivor bounced over the next two fences like a rubber ball.

  I gave him a stroke on the neck as he cantered away from the fence, head nodding with pleasure, and we rounded the end of the arena and looped back at an easy lope, so I didn’t see Gayle crossing the parking lot, hard hat unbuckled and mud on her breeches, until she was already climbing under the rail of the arena. Anna was running to meet her, Mason jogging obediently behind her. “What happened?” I shouted, spurring Ivor towards the girls, and Gayle turned a tear-streaked face towards me.

  “I fell,” she admitted brokenly. “And Maxine took off, and Kennedy said she’d ride after her once she got me back safe.”

  “Where’s Kennedy now?” A red mist of anger danced in front of my eyes. She’d said she’d do anything to keep the barn open. Couldn’t she see that she was destroying everything?

  Ivor was feeding off my tension and began to prance in place, snorting and throwing splatter of foam from his bit.

  Gayle had to jump back to avoid getting stepped upon by my dancing steed. Ivor was not a horse you wanted to crowd when he was feeling nervous. He had feet like serving platters.

  “She turned around after she got me to the trail head. She went to find Maxine.” Gayle shook her head and put her face in her hands. “This is all my fault. I shouldn’t have gone out there… I should have listened to you… my husband is going to kill me if anything happens to that horse…”

  That was probably true, all of it, I thought. She should have listened to me, and her husband was going to kill her. I knew how hard Gayle worked, like a lot of the others worked, to find the money to keep their horses going and their families happy at the same time. No one wanted to give up a vacation or summer camp or a new car because Mom wanted to play with ponies. Families were selfish that way, they couldn’t help themselves. It was one reason I didn’t have a family myself.

  I gathered up my reins. “Anna, take care of Gayle. Tell Tom to cool out Mason for you. I’m going to go find Kennedy and Maxine.” To the south, the dark clouds beyond the barn growled, a long low rumble like a shuddering earthquake rippling through the sandy soil. Luckily, my way was east. I wheeled Ivor and trotted away.

  Ivor hadn’t been on the trails in years, and neither had I. There were still stark white blazes on the trees where Kennedy had first come through with her machete, slashing off overgrown branches and unwanted brush, but the footing underneath was trampled down, hardened by the passing hooves over the past few weeks.

  The land around us was scruffy Florida scrub: tall, gaunt slash and longleaf pines, vast and impenetrable thickets of palmetto, clumps of turkey oak, the occasional cabbage palm. The sand was chalk-white on top, charcoal black beneath. Here and there, the ground was scattered with actual charcoal, remnants of the natural cycles of wildfires. The blazes scorched the palmettos to their thick roots and blackened the bark of the pines, clearing the way for new growth. When I was a little kid, I’d dig out the charcoal chunks from the empty lots in our neighborhood and write on the driveway with them, drawing pictures of ponies with rippling manes and flowing tails, like my Sailor.

  Ivor pricked his ears at the sounds, tilting his head this way and that to take in his surroundings. The underbrush was alive with peeping frogs in still puddles, clicking ticking insects burrowed into palmetto roots, tiny darting lizards racing about everywhere. We were already deep into wild Florida, though just steps outside my barn, only a few miles from the white concrete and stucco apartment houses of urban sprawl. I couldn’t help but look around the countryside with pleasure as we trotted across the flat land, and Ivor seemed pretty pleased with life as well. His strides grew longer, his neck arched, and he drew his hindquarters well beneath him, feeling as powerful as Pegasus before that fabled steed launched into the endless skies. Horses grew bigger outside of the arena. They understood distance and space as freedom more fully than a human, who built fences and houses and walls and rooms almost without thinking about it. Humans were drawn to partitioning and containing as a moths were drawn to a flame, or as a horse to a hay-pile, if you came right down to it.

  And there was no better way to see the landscape, especially in the high palmettos of the scrub, than from the back of a horse. Ahead, I could see the approaching dome of the cypress trees encircling the gator pond, and
just before it, the oak-crowned hump of the old shell midden standing out like a mountain on the flat land. Above it all, the dark southern sky was ghostly with white egrets flying to their evening roosts. They glowed electric-white against the threatening clouds and the black trees.

  Ivor picked his head up a bit higher as we rounded the curve in the trail and entered the hammock of live oaks and whiskery sabal palms overgrowing the midden. Within its shadows, the air was damp and cool. We trotted up the rise and came to a clearing at the very top, where we nearly collided with Kennedy and Sailor. Ivor slammed on the breaks, his ears nearly in my face as he reared up in astonishment, and Sailor jumped backwards, eyes white-rimmed and expression as awake as I’d ever seen on the quiet little horse’s indifferent face.

  Kennedy didn’t look so much surprised as miserable. “I don’t see Maxine anywhere,” she said grimly, without any preamble. “Do you think she’ll just find her own way home?”

  A gust of wind blew dry leaves around us in a little twister, and Ivor sidestepped nervously. Without the exhilaration of forward motion, he remembered he didn’t belong out here, and he didn’t know what was expected of him. He twisted his neck, looking first one way and then the other, taking little nervous prancing steps. I sighed. This was one of the experienced horses, one of the few who had been ridden out here before, and he was being silly about everything. Imagine how awful Bailey and Maxine must have behaved, without any idea what was going on around them, where they were going, what they were supposed to expect. That was why first Colleen, and now Gayle, had hit the ground. Inexperience, ill-prepared, inappropriate.

  I glared at Kennedy meaningfully. “She’s never been out here before, so I doubt she’d find her way home.”

  Kennedy shook her head and looked back out over the scrub. She couldn’t have chosen a better vantage point — we were thirty feet above the surrounding plain and there were so few leafy trees to block our way, it was easy to gaze out through the palmettos to search for a large, out-of-place horse. “We were doing pretty well and then a branch fell — that one over there.” She pointed at the great grasping arm of a live oak, at least twelve feet long, lying in a tangle of kudzu vine and bracken near the path. “She wheeled and took off, just left Gayle in the dirt. I mean, it was scary — even Sailor jumped. But she went the wrong way — she went back out into the scrub, not towards the barn. I thought that was weird.”

  “She’s never been out here,” I repeated, shaking my head. “She’s disoriented. She’s probably never even been in the woods in her life. Maxine’s a show horse, always has been. How many times do I have to tell you, Kennedy — these horses are too valuable to just play around with? Their owners have spent fortunes on them. They aren’t pleasure horses.”

  I heard it a split second after I said it.

  My words came out completely wrong.

  If Kennedy noticed, she let it go. She was in too deep a mess to argue semantics with the barn owner, I figured.

  “Where did you ride to?” I asked.

  “The lake,” Kennedy said. “To see the bald eagles.”

  “I didn’t know we had bald eagles out here.” I turned Ivor in the direction of the lake. The old sand road led straight there, due east. “There weren’t any when I was a girl. Guess we’re heading that way anyway. Let’s go see. Maybe Maxine wanted to watch the eagles, too.”

  Ivor cut out his nonsense once he was allowed to go out adventuring on the trail again. He might have spent most of his time in the show-ring, but he had the heart of an explorer, that much was obvious. Maybe his adventurousness was why he enjoyed jumping big scary jumps so much, I mused. At any rate, he clearly remembered the work we’d done on the trails years ago, before I’d decided I couldn’t risk taking him out here any longer. I’d been right to stop bringing him here, of course. Everyone had to draw their own line, and I’d never gotten over Sailor. I knew that as much without needing any soul-searching or therapy or self-help books. I’d never gotten over losing Sailor. Ever since, I’d kept my horses in arenas, where I could manage conditions and keep them safe.

  Still, there was no doubt that Ivor was having fun now, even without the security of groomed footing and guiding walls. He snorted and blew at alarming shrubs and worrisome bunnies, but his trot was confident and energetic, and our sojourn across the scrub was actually pleasant, despite the cause.

  As we jogged east I turned my head to the right and watched the thunderstorm blowing itself to pieces, to the left to see the clearing evening sky, and couldn’t contain a sigh of pleasure when the evening sun suddenly emerged from the clouds behind us and lit the palmettos and pines all around in a golden glittering glow.

  Beside me, trotting along on a lop-eared Sailor, Kennedy smiled.

  I frowned and resolved to get back to business. We were looking for a horse, not taking a joy-ride.

  Still, it was overly-observant Ivor who was first to spot the horseshoe, twisted and glinting in the white sand. “She went this-a-way,” I observed, straightening out my shying horse. “At least we’re on the right path.”

  We slowed as the live oaks surrounding the lake loomed before us, and the horses walked carefully between their twisting branches, dodging Spanish moss and spiderwebs. It was nearly dark in the hammock, but to our right we could see the dark water lapping around cypress knees. There were alligators in there, and water moccasins, just as I had warned the boarders, but if we didn’t bother them, they wouldn’t bother us. Probably.

  We emerged onto a little swath of green grass on the shores of the lake, just a sink-hole pond, really, a round depression of dark water, and there Maxine was grazing, her flanks sweaty. She lifted her head to see us and the broken reins dangled from her bridle. She nickered with pleasure at the sight of friends, and I sighed. It could have been so much worse.

  It could have been Sailor all over again.

  “I’ll get her,” Kennedy said, and started to walk Sailor towards the mare.

  Then she stopped. “Look,” she said, pointing up.

  There they were — four bald eagles, soaring through the golden-lit sky on broad wings. One by one they landed in the highest reaches of a towering bald cypress, heads turning this way and that, zeroing in quickly on us. I felt goosebumps rising on my arm. The eagles were unimaginably majestic and otherworldly, avian kings in a land already populated by dozens of massive, beautiful birds. Ospreys and kites and herons were nothing next to these eagles, which seemed as large as ponies.

  Maxine, fed up and ready to go home to her dinner, broke into a trot to meet us, and one by one the eagles erupted from the tree and soared away, shrieking their displeasure with high-pitched, wild cries.

  Kennedy took Maxine’s broken reins as the mare shoved against Sailor, nuzzling at him with the devotion all horses seemed to show the little Quarter Horse. He was like a horse guru, meditating cross-legged in his mountain-top hut, calming the panicked herd one by one. Well, he couldn’t always get the job done in time, I reflected, or we wouldn’t be out here. There was more to teaching a horse self-confidence than sticking them alongside a confident horse.

  “Can you believe that?” Kennedy was gushing. “A whole family of eagles!”

  I shook my head. “I’ve never seen anything like that before,” I admitted. Back when I’d ridden out here as a child, bald eagles were still a rarity. I’d never seen one in the wild before. I never would have today, if I hadn’t left the arena. That was something to think about, I supposed, but it didn’t change the facts I had laid down for the boarders. It didn’t change the risks. I watched Maxine carefully all the way out of the little field, making sure she didn’t put a single hoof wrong.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  We rode back towards the barn, straight into the golden glare of the setting sun, the chill of autumn creeping through the palmettos and raising goosebumps on bare skin. Whip-poor-wills sang in the lengthening shadows, and a flock of white ibis, the curves of their long red beaks glinting in the last rays of light,
solemnly watched us from the stark branches of a longleaf pine high above our heads. As we crossed over the shell mound, bats began to flutter drunkenly through the dusk, snapping at mosquitoes, and we urged the horses to a canter, hoping to reach home before full dark. Ahead, winking in the western sky, Venus glinted in a sky fading from yellow to jewel-blue. Everything — every inch of land and sky — was beautiful, and seeing it from atop a good horse made it a thousand times more so.

  I hadn’t felt so free and alive in years.

  I suspected, judging by his pricked ears and out-flung hooves, Ivor felt the same way.

  I glanced over at Maxine, jogging along next to Sailor. She alone didn’t look like she was having fun — she looked frightened and miserable, drenched in sweat, looking all around with white-ringed eyes. Watching for gremlins, I thought. Her hide shivered as branches scraped against her on narrow sections of trail, and she swished her tail constantly, as if scraping away unseen insects and worries.

  “Poor city horse,” I said after a few minutes of watching Maxine’s nervous tics.

  Kennedy glanced back. Her face was flushed with all the trotting and the effort of dragging Maxine along. “What’s that?”

  “I said poor city horse,” I repeated. “She doesn’t like it out here one bit.”

  Kennedy looked over at the laboring Maxine. “You really think she’s never been ridden outside an arena in her entire life?”

  It was the first time Kennedy had admitted any of the horses might be over-faced by adventures in the wild realm beyond the arena. “I seriously doubt it. She came from Germany when she was five and she was already an accomplished jumper. She’s been with me for three years and she’s never been on the trails in that time. So this was probably her first experience out in the woods.”

  “With you? I thought she was Gayle’s horse. Gayle said —”