Catch Rider (9780544034303)

by Lyne, Jennifer H.

  A Mexican stable hand in his forties nodded at Wayne and looked at me. He carried himself like a barn manager, checking the horses, watching what the other grooms were doing.

  “Whatever you do, you don’t talk to that lazy son of a bitch,” Wayne said to me loudly. The man turned and smiled.

  This meant that the man was someone I could trust. The meaner the insult, the closer the friend. Sure enough, Wayne winked and told me that was Edgar, one of the grooms.

  The barn was all oak with brass fixtures. I had never seen anything like it before. There wasn’t a speck of hay or sawdust in the aisle. A brass nameplate was attached to the door of each stall. SUMMER BREEZE. LADY GAGA. DANCING BEAR. I saw a big gray hunter resting his chest against a nylon stall guard with his head way out in the aisle. I saw some Welsh ponies and what looked like Thoroughbreds. Each one was clipped and clean—I mean, not even an inch of a whisker. No hair in the ears, no dirt, nothing. I’d never been in a barn that barely smelled like a barn.

  Mexican grooms were cleaning stalls, clipping, wrapping legs, and feeding. They talked quietly to one another in Spanish and moved around the horses with ease.

  I followed Wayne down the aisle.

  In one stall I saw a black bay Thoroughbred, standing up and sound asleep. On his blanket was his name in script: KATAHDIN. The aisle between the rows of stalls was lined with monogrammed fiberglass tack trunks.

  I walked by the open tack room and looked in, smelling glycerin saddle soap and neat’s-foot oil. Two grooms were cleaning dirty bridles hanging from a hook. They wiped their sponges across the translucent gold bars of soap in a quick rhythm. I could see from across the room that the bridles were made of English leather, not the cheap Indian leather that was already dark brown when it was brand-new and tore after only a year.

  Wayne handed me a pitchfork and wheelbarrow and pointed to a row of stalls. A metal bowl with a cone on the bottom was bolted inside the first stall, and I asked Wayne what it was.

  “Automatic watering system,” he said.

  I’d read about these but had never seen one in real life. When a horse drank all the water, the metal bowl filled up on its own. I just stared at it, thinking about the hours and hours I’d spent—in the heat, in ice storms, you name it—filling up water buckets. “Do they freeze?”

  “Hell no, they don’t freeze,” he said. “They’re heated.”

  “So nobody here ever has to break the ice in the water buckets,” I said.

  “Nope. And if the horse wants fresh water, he just pushes that knob with his nose,” he said. I guess he saw me wondering why we didn’t have that system. “These things cost about three hundred dollars each, and don’t even ask how much it is to do the plumbing and ’lectricity.”

  He gestured to the wheelbarrow, letting me know we had to stop talking and work, and disappeared down the aisle. I pulled the wheelbarrow up to the first empty stall and shoveled hard.

  Two girls a little older than me came around the corner in polo shirts, riding breeches, and black boots, and I peeked out at them through the bars. Their riding clothes were dirty, and their spurs were still fastened to their boots. They were tall and thin, with long shiny hair pulled into ponytails. One had thick blond streaks from the sun and wore a green shirt. She didn’t have much makeup on. She had no expression on her face and an upside-down mouth, like a fish, and she walked like a jock. The other one had dark hair and looked a little friendlier.

  “My mom bought that gelding,” said the dark-haired one.

  “What?” said the blond one.

  “I know—she’s crazy. She must have been on Klonopin.”

  “He’s totally green. She can’t ride him.”

  “She paid fifty thousand dollars for him,” said the dark-haired one.

  “Oh my God.” The blond one giggled loudly.

  “She didn’t even ask my dad.”

  I waited for them to go by, but they stopped a few feet away.

  “Is that Scotty’s new turnout blanket?” the blonde asked. “It’s green and blue.”

  “Those are my horse’s colors.”

  “I guess now they’re hers, too. She is such a copycat,” said the blonde.

  “She’s moving him to another barn this week. Thank God.”

  I pushed the wheelbarrow, piled high with manure, out of the stall. The girls looked me up and down, said squirrelly little “hi”s, and watched me go by. I dumped the wheelbarrow into the manure pile, filled it up with sawdust, and pushed it back down the aisle past them. It was squeaking loudly, and I could feel them staring at me. I heard one of them murmur something. When I looked up at them, they smiled a little too hard.

  Suddenly, a man’s voice boomed down the aisle. “Are your horses cooled and washed, tack cleaned?”

  “We were just—” the tall one started.

  “Did you cool that horse off or just throw him in his stall? And did you put ointment in the pony’s eye?”

  The other girl was cowering. “Sorry, Dutch.”

  I froze. Had she really said “Dutch”?

  A tall middle-aged man rounded the corner. It was the Dutch Thompson, who coached all the top equitation riders in the area. He always had a few riders in the finals. Equitation is a small world—it’s junior riders only, under eighteen, and it’s judged on the rider, not the horse. I’d never been in an equitation class in a horse show. But I knew I could compete in one if I wanted to. It was just a test of horsemanship, and I was a better horseman than any of these girls.

  I’d been reading about Dutch Thompson for years. I’d seen at least fifty pictures of him coaching, I’d watched videos of his clinics, I’d read his column in The Chronicle of the Horse. I knew his horses’ names from back when he used to compete in Grand Prix jumping events around the world. I knew what color breeches he wore and how he rode with his lower leg a little bit forward like they did on a fox hunt. I knew that he grew up in The Plains, Virginia, and that he spent every winter on the Florida circuit.

  But I didn’t know Wayne worked for him. That dumb old man had told me all this time that he was “working at some show barn” in Crozet, and when I’d asked him the details, he’d just said, “Ponies.” What a fool. I wanted to go find him, but I couldn’t move because Dutch Thompson was staring me down like he was going to eat me. He was polished, all business, in clean khakis and a striped oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up. In that outfit, he looked like he was working in an office, not running a barn.

  “That horse gets peanut hulls. Didn’t you see that?” he said sharply, towering over me and watching me with hawk eyes. I was too scared to answer.

  He pointed to a chalkboard on the wall, then over at the horses.

  “This horse gets straw in his stall, this one sawdust. Water bowls are scrubbed every day with Betadine.” He looked around—for a groom, I guessed. “Is someone training this girl?”

  Dutch walked to another stall, slid the door open, and examined a chunky chestnut. He rested his hand on the horse’s chest to see if he had a fever, pulled the horse’s lip up, pressed into his gums, and watched the color return to the thumbprint. He caught me watching him.

  “I need those stalls done. We’re bringing horses in,” he said coldly.

  I started shoveling fast, sweating. I cleaned one stall, then another. I felt like it was taking forever. At one point, I knocked into the wheelbarrow handle and dumped it over, spilling sawdust into the aisle.

  “Here’s what you do.” I turned and saw Wayne looking at me through the bars.

  “You could have told me this was Dutch Thompson’s barn.”

  “You heard of him?” Wayne said.

  “Yeah, I heard of him. He’s famous.”

  Wayne shrugged.

  “I have two more stalls,” I said.

  “First get rid of the wet bedding. Then take whatever is dirty but dry and stomp it down into the wet spot to soak it up.”

  “You done with yours?”

  He nodded and pushed
his steel-tipped boot down into the straw, which soaked up the urine. I could tell he’d done this a thousand times.

  When we were finished cleaning, I followed Wayne outside along a fence line toward the upper fields. We passed Dutch giving a lesson to a girl on a pony, trotting back and forth over a wooden pole on the ground.

  “See that pony tossing his head?” asked Wayne. “He’s out of patience, and in a minute he’s gonna get ornery. He wants to jump.”

  Sure enough, the pony put his head down and bucked. “Pull his head up!” Dutch yelled to the rider.

  “You don’t think Dutch knows what he’s doing?” I asked Wayne.

  “Not if you ask me. Or that pony.” He reconsidered. “Well, he do and he don’t,” he admitted. “He knows how to win.”

  We walked up the hill toward an old brick mansion surrounded by boxwood hedges.

  “The Wakefields live there,” said Wayne.

  Wayne gave me a halter and lead rope, and he rattled the gate loudly. Hearing the sound, a group of tall, muscular horses in their paddocks lumbered over the hill toward us. Glistening in the sun, they stomped their feet impatiently, ready to go in and eat dinner. They were well fed, lean, and strong. Wayne glanced at me to see my reaction. I had never seen horseflesh like this.

  “We got two Danish Warmbloods, a Thoroughbred, and a Hanoverian mare,” Wayne said proudly. “And a half-Shire, half-Thoroughbred gelding.”

  He gestured toward a dark dapple gray. “That there’s an Oldenburg gelding,” he continued. “Get too close and he will bite the living hell outta you.”

  The big horse extended his neck and snapped at me, and I pushed his cheek away. “That horse must be seventeen and a half hands,” I said.

  “He jumps big, too,” Wayne said.

  “We each get three?”

  “Naw . . . they don’t like us walking back more than two horses at a time.”

  “Why not? That’s stupid.”

  “Honey, that German horse must be worth a coupla hundred thousand dollars all by himself.”

  “God Almighty,” I said.

  I looked at the German horse. He had a lazy, bored look and a big green stain on his flank.

  “So you’d better do a good job getting that shit stain off his belly.”

  We walked back leading one horse each and made the trip two more times, turning the big horses loose in their nice, clean stalls, where they rooted around in the white pine shavings. I tied up the massive gray horse in the wash stall. As I hosed him down, he showed his big teeth and pink gums. I laughed at him as he tried to bite the water like a dog.

  “Careful—don’t get water in his ears. He’ll turn into Satan himself.”

  I turned to see a boy, maybe about eighteen, with his hands in his pockets. He wore a baseball cap and an old Wilson’s Feed and Seed T-shirt. He was a little skinny, with hazel eyes and light brown hair. I was embarrassed at the way I looked, sawdust all over my pants, and I tried to brush my hair out of my face.

  “Is he yours?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I spotted him as a baby, and they bought him really cheap. The seller thought he was permanently lame, but it was just a pulled muscle. He’s fine now.”

  “He’s got some big feet,” I said.

  “You don’t have to tell me!” He laughed. “Nearly broke my foot last week, big dumb bastard. Watch this.”

  He scratched the horse under his belly, and the horse stuck his neck out and lifted his lip, enjoying it.

  “I’m Wes,” the boy said.

  “Sid.”

  “You from around here?” he asked.

  “Near Covington.”

  “That’s a ways away,” he said. “I don’t know how anyone lives there with the smell of the paper mill.”

  “You get used to it,” I lied. “Where you from?”

  “I grew up in Nelson County.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Massies Mill.”

  I remembered a fat Shetland pony I’d seen with Wayne over in Massies Mill. The owner had told Wayne the horse was ten, but when we got there, we could tell across the paddock that the pony was about thirty years old.

  “Why are you laughing?” he asked.

  “I thought only pigs and chickens lived in Massies Mill,” I said.

  He looked a little hurt and I felt stupid. I had just been trying to be funny.

  “We had pigs,” he said. “Also horses, cows, guineas, and everything in between.”

  “Your daddy is a pig farmer? Really?”

  “And a blacksmith and a carpenter. Whatever pays.”

  “My uncle’s like that,” I said.

  He sure acted different from the boys his age at school.

  “Where do you go to school?” I asked him.

  “Nelson County High School, in Lovingston. I’m a junior.”

  I was just about to tell him proudly that Wayne was my uncle when the tall girl in the green shirt from before walked around the corner. She came up behind Wes and put her arms around him. He turned, looking startled, and she kissed him. Right on the mouth.

  “Hi, Kelly,” he said.

  I felt a knot in my stomach that made me embarrassed all over again. Kelly ignored me as I finished washing the gelding. “How was school?” he asked her.

  “Whatever. Another exciting day at St. Elizabeth’s.”

  She tilted her head, gathered her hair on one side, and twirled her little earring between her thumb and forefinger.

  “Can you get her horse tacked up, Wes?” barked a short-haired woman of about fifty, overtanned, with the same fish mouth as Kelly’s. “I want her to be warmed up before the lesson starts.”

  “Yes, Dee Dee,” he answered.

  “I didn’t know you were coming, Mom,” muttered the girl.

  I noticed that Dee Dee was wearing a diamond bracelet. In the barn.

  “I’m watching your lesson, Kelly,” Dee Dee said.

  Kelly looked like all the air had been sucked out of her. She hunched her shoulders and exchanged a look with Wes.

  I put the gray horse into his stall, and Kelly followed me. “Make sure you put extra shavings in here around the edges,” she told me. “This horse gets stuck against the wall while he’s sleeping and can’t get up. It’s really dangerous—”

  “Cast,” I said.

  “What?”

  “He gets cast in his stall. That’s the word.”

  “I know,” said Kelly defensively. She looked me up and down and walked away, slinging a lead rope over her shoulder.

  “Who is that?” Dee Dee asked her, gesturing toward me.

  “I don’t know.”

  I watched some of Kelly’s lesson through the bars on the windows. She was jumping an elegant chestnut back and forth over a vertical in the middle of the ring, and Dutch’s voice boomed throughout the ring and the barn.

  “Move him up,” he said after one jump.

  She circled around and came back the other way.

  “Make him bend,” Dutch said. “Go wide and jump in easy . . .”

  “Move him up” meant make him go faster or make his strides longer so that he covered more ground. “Make him bend” meant that the horse should use his whole body in the turns. When a horse bent through the turn, he had his rear end up under him and was using all his strength. If he was balanced right, he’d jump better. Some people called this “setting him up.” I’d never heard anyone say “jump in easy,” but I guessed that it meant get in a little closer.

  I watched Kelly move the horse up, jump in too easy, and pull a rail off the vertical.

  “Not spur, leg. Just leg,” Dutch said. “And I wouldn’t be afraid to ask him for his leads.”

  The lead was which front leg came first at a canter. If you picture a horse running around a turn, of course he’d want the inside leg coming first. Having the outside leg come first is called a “counter-canter,” otherwise known as “the wrong lead.” They made you counter-canter in an equitation class. Not
too many of the horses we broke at Wayne’s would hold a counter-canter. They weren’t well schooled enough.

  Dutch set up a course of eight fences, and Kelly rode the course. I had to work, so I couldn’t watch all of it, but I saw a couple of other girls watching Kelly’s lesson like she was some kind of celebrity. At one point, Kelly’s horse slammed on the brakes and refused a fence, and she had to circle around and keep trying.

  When the lesson was over, Kelly walked the horse back toward the barn. Dee Dee was following, scolding her. “You’re relying on the number of strides and not your eye.”

  “Why did you keep talking about moving up and making it five strides, then?” Kelly asked. “You say that, and then you say to use my eye!”

  “Did you get anything out of that lesson?” Dee Dee asked.

  “I would have if you hadn’t been there!” Kelly said. She sounded like she was about to cry.

  I ducked down to make sure they couldn’t see me.

  All this time, Wes was exercising a horse in a warm-up ring. He never muscled the horse with his strength, like many men do. He trotted a gelding over low jumps, patting him on the neck. The horse looked very green, barely broke.

  Kelly and one of her friends came up behind me and saw me watching Wes. I didn’t know the other girl’s name—they all looked exactly alike with their buff breeches, field boots, alligator shirts, and ponytails. Kelly seemed upset, and I felt sorry for her. I thought about saying something, decided not to, but then a flicker of goodwill passed over me.

  “I saw some of your lesson,” I said. “You did a nice job.”

  “Don’t watch my lesson,” she said with her lip back, showing a row of perfect white teeth. The look on her face was so angry that I just stood there and stared. “You’re supposed to be cleaning stalls,” she said.

  She looked at her friend and they laughed at me, like it was a joke.

  “I ride, too, you know,” I said.

  They laughed even harder.

  “She rides, too!” Kelly said. “What do you ride?”