“Hunters.”
They kept laughing. Kelly put her hand on the side of the barn to hold herself up. “She rides hunters.” Kelly put her other hand on her chest as if she was having a heart attack.
Her friend wheezed and held her side, as if she’d never heard anything as funny as what I’d said.
I imagined stuffing their pretty faces into the dirty stall next to me, manure stuck in their lip-gloss.
I knew they couldn’t do half the things I’d done.
TEN
DURING THE LONG ride home, I wanted to kick myself for trying to be nice to Kelly. Why the hell did I think I needed to prove myself to her? Who gave a shit what she thought? I was too angry and humiliated to tell Wayne what had happened. He would just make it worse. He’d warned me, and I was already ignoring his advice. Something inside me had lit on fire when those girls had laughed at me, and it wasn’t a good thing. Wayne would tell me to go in there, clean stalls, and keep my mouth shut.
I asked Wayne what those girls were doing at Oak Hill. He told me they were trying to qualify for the Maclay Finals by winning points in Maclay classes, held at big horse shows. I had read about the Maclay competition many times and stared at pictures of the winning horses and riders in Practical Horseman for years. I had imagined Maclay riders as nice girls who had worked hard to get there and the horses as their best friends, but it wasn’t turning out that way. It looked like these bitchy girls were buying the best horses and the best trainers, and not even enjoying any of it.
Wayne said Oak Hill was a full-service barn. That meant that these girls didn’t groom, wash, or clean their horses. They didn’t tack up or untack. When they went to a show, their horses met them there.
I’d had no idea. I’d thought show riders were just cleaner than the rest of us. I’d thought they got up to braid at four o’clock in the morning. I thought they had some magical way of cleaning tack that only took them two seconds. I never imagined that they had an army of grooms doing everything for them.
I wondered how people got this rich. Did they work harder? Were they smarter? I knew some poor people who worked hard as hell. I also knew some poor people who didn’t. Some were sharp and some were dumb as dirt. But now I wanted to know where all this money came from and what you had to do to get it. We learned in history class about England and France and how if you were born a shoemaker or a factory worker there, then, by God, that was what you were, no matter how much money you made. Not only that, but your kids would stay in that class and so would their kids. But this was America, and it wasn’t supposed to work that way.
Wayne took me to my car and I drove home. As I walked across the porch, I could hear Donald talking on the phone, and I stopped to listen. He was talking to Melinda about moving, about all of us living somewhere else. He was telling her that his cousin in Bakersfield, California, worked in an oil refinery and could get him a job.
My heart jumped into my throat. I wondered if I should let them know I’d heard. I just wanted to scream. There was a trash bag on the porch that was about to split open. My father never would have left garbage on the porch like that. He would have taken it out to the trash can and then scrubbed the can in the kitchen clean. I pictured us out in Bakersfield, California, with the trash blowing across the porch.
The sugar maple branch scraped against the porch roof. There wouldn’t be sugar maples there, either. What if he made us go before the leaves turned and came down?
I loved it best when the leaves came off that sugar maple tree, all except a little cluster on the east side. That tree had been the only thing blocking us from the Hardee’s parking lot until Jimmy planted a cluster of white pines. Now you could hear people in the parking lot at night, but you didn’t have to look at them.
I stood on the porch and looked in through the window. Donald pulled out a cigarette from his front pocket, put it between his lips.
I walked in the door. He knew I’d heard.
“My cousin said he can get me a job for seventy-five thousand with my management experience. Full benefits. Your mother knows and she wants to go too.”
I pictured Melinda trying to grow tomato plants in the dry sand of California behind a sad little house that looked out on an oil refinery. She would die. I would die.
He was holding a silver lighter.
“That’s my father’s.”
“Your mother told me I could use it.”
“Well, you can’t.”
“Honey, your daddy is gone,” Donald said. “I don’t mean to be hard or nothing, but get over it.”
“My father would kill you with his bare hands for saying that in this house. You are a no-good, lying son of a bitch, and one of these days Melinda’s going to figure it out.”
Damned if he didn’t smack me right across the face.
I fell backwards onto the floor. I couldn’t get up—I couldn’t even breathe. No one had ever hit me before. I looked at his dirty socks and waited to see if he would come closer.
“I’m fourteen years old.”
It just came out. I was so scared, I thought he might kill me.
He got so close to my face that I could see his yellow teeth, his red gums receding and showing their bare roots.
“See what you made me do with that mouth of yours? Somebody’s going to really hurt you one day for talking like that. And it might be me.”
I crawled away from him and stood up, rubbing my face to make the pain stop. The way he was looking at me was weird, like he wasn’t finished.
“Give me the lighter,” I said.
He took a long drag, started to put the lighter back in his pocket. I grabbed for it, but he held it away. I smelled the smoke and liquor on his breath.
“What about asking nicely,” Donald said.
“May I have that lighter?” I asked.
I was scared he was going to hit me again, and he knew it. He handed it to me but held on as I touched it.
“You need to learn to act like a lady.”
I pulled the lighter away from him and walked out, wondering if he was going to chase me.
“Where you going? You can’t take that car nowhere but to school and the barn!” he yelled.
I got into my car, locked the doors, and peeled out.
I couldn’t tell Wayne what had happened or all hell would break loose. As tough as Wayne was, Donald was crazy. All the guns in the world were no match for crazy.
Before Donald, my mother and I had been planning to have a good life together, just the two of us. We were going to go to the beach. I slept in her bed for two weeks after Jimmy died, and we talked about all of it. She told me that she’d always wanted to go to Scotland where some of our ancestors were from and that we could go on an overnight trail ride together. But my mother was a captive now, and none of that was ever going to happen.
ELEVEN
DRIVING UP ROUTE 220, I decided I needed a gun. That bastard wasn’t done with me. Jimmy would want me to get a damn pistol and put a slug right between Donald’s eyes if he ever laid a hand on me again. That I knew for sure.
I saw the Tastee-Freez and pulled into the parking lot. Four teenagers sat on the hood of a car, laughing and flirting. I pulled some crumpled bills out of my pocket and picked a few quarters off the dirty floor mat, then ordered a cheeseburger and fries from the takeout window. I recognized one of the kids as the cute boy from the lunchroom. The other boy was his ugly, dimwitted friend. His family lived in the trailer park and fought with everyone in town about everything. He’d been in trouble for hunting on posted land, drunk driving, and selling pot, but he finally got his when he tried to lie to a game warden about his fishing license. In Allegheny County, that was like treason. The game warden took one look at his gap-toothed lying smile, arrested him, and sent him to jail for two weeks.
The dimwit looked me up and down. “Hey, ain’t your uncle Wayne Stewart?”
I ignored him.
“’Scuse me!” he said, louder.
�
��Yeah, what if he is?” I answered.
“Does he live in that old shit shack down in the hollow?”
His girlfriend laughed.
I got ketchup for my fries, trying to ignore them. I was so hungry that I was shaking. I walked toward my car clutching the bag of food.
“I’m just asking,” he continued. “Didn’t think anyone could live in a house that had a hole in the roof. Does he have a toilet, or does he shit in the field with the donkeys?”
I faced him. The girls snickered.
“Come on, Tommy, stop it,” said the cute boy.
I walked up to the dimwit, stopped, clenched my fist, and punched him in the mouth.
One girl screamed. The other one laughed. “Oh, Tommy, you got hit by a girl!”
“Keep talking about my family,” I said as he grabbed his face. “I’ll knock your goddamn teeth out.”
Blood running down his lip, he grabbed me by the throat with both hands. “I’d knock you flat, ’cept I don’t hit girls.”
He tightened his grip until I choked, then let go. I pushed him away and got into my car, coughing.
“Poor white trash!” his girlfriend yelled at me.
“You oughta know!” I yelled back.
I drove half a mile and pulled into the entrance of the National Forest, shoving the food in my mouth without even tasting it. When I parked, I saw two kids making out in the back of a pickup truck. They saw me and sat up quickly, and I realized that it was Eileen Cleek and some boy from school. I put the car in reverse and drove away. Even Eileen Cleek, the girl everyone called a lesbo, had a boyfriend.
I drove up the mountain for half an hour, looking for June. He always made me feel better, but he wasn’t easy to find. He only came out when he was walking to town to get his usual staples: cheese nabs, Dr Pepper, cornmeal, and kerosene. I wondered what it was like to live in the hollow with your brother and sister for seventy years, no electricity or running water. He always seemed happy, and it didn’t take much to make him smile. I had only seen his sister, Maybelle, and his brother, Clifford, once, when I was ten. They had come to church for revival week. I’d never seen their little farm. Jimmy had told me all about it, but he’d always gone there alone.
I parked by the ram, hoping for June. The ram was an old pump the Army Corps of Engineers had put near Natural Well, and it made a low, rhythmic sound as it pumped cold water out of the ground and over the mossy rocks in the shade. This was near the path June took to get to his house, but no one else knew.
Boy, I bet they’d made some moonshine back in that hollow years ago. Wayne had explained to me how perfect these mountains were for homemade liquor—you got the clean water, the kind of trees that didn’t give off much smoke, and the privacy of the deep dark hollows. Wayne and Jimmy used to get jars of apple brandy from somewhere up in here, but hell if I knew where.
I watched the ram pumping water, imagining it was corn liquor trickling through the rocks. I wondered how many people had sat here and thought the same thing. I waited, but all I saw was a big tom turkey fly along the fence line and nearly crash into a utility pole.
When it started getting dark half an hour later, I gave up and drove to Wayne’s house. He made me a bowl of stew and handed me a blanket.
“What’s the matter, girl?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“It can’t be all that bad.”
“Mind your own goddamn business,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about it.” But then I started crying real hard. Wayne came over and hugged me. His arms were bony, but when he hugged me tight I could feel how strong he was.
“Donald wants to move out to the desert in California,” I said. It hurt more saying it out loud because it made it true. “I know Melinda will do it.”
“Well, that’s about the dumbest thing I ever heard. No Criser has lived or ever will live out in the damn desert.”
“He wants to work at some oil refinery where his cousin works.”
I could see a flash of worry deep in Wayne’s eyes that he quickly covered up. The light from the television flickered across his face.
If we moved to the desert, I would never see Uncle Wayne again. The thought of it made me want to die. I wanted to ask him if I could live with him if that happened, but I was scared he would say no again. I was scared he would tell me he couldn’t have no little girl living with him, that I would have to go with Melinda.
But I decided to speak up anyway. “Wayne, if they leave, I can’t go there.” I choked up again.
He looked at me like a statue. Then he crossed his feet in front of the fire.
“You can stay in the barn. But that donkey might stomp you while you’re sleeping.” He winked. “Of course you can stay here.”
He threw another pillow to me, and I tucked it under my head and fell asleep. I dared anyone to come get me here at Uncle Wayne’s.
TWELVE
THE NEXT MORNING, the sun was bright. It was the first day of September, and the air was clear. I told Wayne I didn’t want to go to school.
“I’ll bush hog the paddock,” I volunteered. “Got enough weeds in there to choke an elephant.”
“I ain’t leavin’ you here to run the damn rotary cutter all by yourself.”
I made myself go to school, staying far away from the rednecks and skipping lunch entirely. I didn’t tell Ruthie about any of it, how Donald had hit me or that I’d punched Tommy and he’d grabbed me. It would scare her half to death, and she would ask too many questions.
Ms. Cash talked about As I Lay Dying. Her eyes twinkled, and I knew she loved the book. I had read it, and most of the time I didn’t know what the hell was happening, but I liked not knowing. I liked understanding something without having to think about it.
Most of the kids didn’t get it, and they complained and said it was dumb because the story was told with different people’s perspectives. Why couldn’t the writer pick his main character? Just when you understood one, the point of view changed to someone else.
“Maybe there is no real story. Maybe everyone has a different version, and they’re all a little true and they’re all a little false, and we should respect how everyone else thinks,” one boy said.
Several kids nodded in agreement.
“God’s version is the true version,” said a girl. “The writer should try to think in terms of God’s perspective.”
I laughed out loud.
Some kids said it was a desecration when the mother’s body fell out of the coffin. Poor Ms. Cash, trying to save their souls from the preacher who told them they weren’t supposed to study anything but scripture.
I rode to the barn with Wayne after school, and the trip seemed shorter this time. Wayne told me about Dee Dee, how she was a champion rider but had a reputation for what he called “funny stuff.” He meant that she gave her horses drugs.
I had read that people like that were always staying one step ahead of USEF—the United States Equestrian Federation—but sometimes their horses were drug tested at shows. One time, a lady’s horse got disqualified after she’d given him a can of Coke and he’d tested positive for caffeine. Wayne didn’t judge people who played around with the rules unless they were downright inhumane. So for him to make a comment about Dee Dee—that was something.
I looked for Wes but he wasn’t around. Not like I really cared—I just thought I might run into him. I saw myself in the dirty tack-room mirror, my hair frizzy from sweating, circles under my eyes. Kelly had such smooth, shiny hair, and she was so confident.
I sat silently in the lunchroom while Uncle Wayne talked horses with the stable hands. I was picking at a blister on the inside of my knuckle at the base of my index finger.
“Let me see your hand,” Wayne said. I showed him my palms, rubbed raw with fat blisters. He reached up into a cabinet, opened a saltshaker, and set it down. He opened his pocketknife and grabbed my hand. I jerked it away.
“Fine. It’ll be infected and hurt a hell of a lot more than it
does now.”
I let him slice the blister open and rub salt into it. It burned like hell. I clamped my teeth down and my eyes teared up.
“After a few days, you won’t need no gloves.”
Wayne let me bathe a bay mare in the wash stall. I scrubbed her tail with soap and sprayed it with ShowSheen to repel the dust. I painted her feet with hoof polish, the dark lacquer dripping off the golden brush, leaving mahogany horseshoe prints on the concrete. I could have done it for hours. The mare liked me and closed her eyes sleepily while I worked on her tail. She rested her big head in the crossties and fell asleep.
I knew I could untangle this horse’s dirty tail every day, clean her stall and a hundred more, wash every damn horse in the field, if I didn’t have to speak to another human being for the rest of my life. Horses trusted me, and I could be myself around them.
Kelly, Wes, and Dee Dee appeared just as the mare pawed to get out, raking her metal shoe against the concrete, the grinding sound echoing through the barn. When Wes saw me, he smiled and said hello.
“Is someone watching this horse?” Kelly yelled. She sure didn’t miss an opportunity to make somebody look bad. I didn’t answer. I unhooked the mare from the crossties and walked her down the aisle.
It was time for Kelly’s lesson, and there was activity in the barn. A couple of other riders were getting their horses ready to join her. Her mother was walking down the aisle inspecting horses with her arms crossed.
I saw a silver Mercedes pull into the driveway and park right next to the building. The driver was an old man who wore an oxford shirt and riding breeches with socks pulled up over them to his knees, worn loafers, and a tweed newsboy cap. His face was pink with gin blossoms. He opened his door, and a pint of vodka, stuffed behind old maps and mail, fell out from the door’s side compartment and clinked on the gravel.
“Jesus Christ, Herbert,” said the old lady in the passenger’s seat. She had short gray hair and pink lipstick. These must be the Wakefields, I thought.
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