She handed me a tiny box, and I opened it. It was a little piece of rose quartz on a thin gold chain. I put the necklace on and she fastened it for me.
“I found it on our trip to the Trueheart Mine. I thought it might bring you some good luck.”
She looked shy when she said this, and I realized that it wasn’t about luck at all. She was giving it to me so I wouldn’t forget we were friends. But I knew we’d stay close, because things were always the same with us. She told me I could come visit her at boarding school and that there were a lot of horses at the school that I could ride.
On the way back to Wayne’s, when I got to the top of the main road, I found myself peeling down toward the hollow, toward where June lived. I parked at the ram and walked through the woods. I knew where the house was—I could have found it blindfolded if a bear didn’t get me first. I had absorbed the map of these woods by osmosis. I had learned that word in biology, and I loved it. Osmosis is when molecules move across a membrane on their own, without anyone pushing them. They just do it. I liked the idea of things happening on their own, without anyone pushing them.
The woods were very thick. June and his brother and sister wanted it that way so no one would find them, and they didn’t clear the underbrush. I picked my way through the black locust, bull thistle hedges, and autumn olive. I knew that June had a trail somewhere but I couldn’t see it. One time National Geographic came to look for the family, and the lady at the post office sent the reporters to the wrong hollow on purpose, just like the locals used to do to the revenuers back during Prohibition.
I saw smoke and knew I was almost there. I rounded a ridge and saw the little cabin. Boy, that wood fire smelled good. I wondered if they would invite me in and we’d sit down and eat biscuits together, like in a fairy tale.
Before I had taken another breath, there was a shotgun in my face. Maybelle was on the other end of it.
“Damn it, Maybelle, I’m Jimmy’s daughter!”
“You ain’t,” she said in a high mountain squeak.
“The hell I ain’t.”
Maybelle was about eighty. She wore an old sweater and pants and men’s boots. She had long gray hair and steely bright blue eyes that didn’t even look real. Her face was so wrinkled that she looked like one of those apple-faced dolls that had been sitting in a closet too long.
June came out of the house, and then I saw the older brother, Clifford, behind the house chopping wood, his eyes on me like a hawk.
“June, tell your sister who I am,” I said.
“That’s Jimmy’s girl, Maybelle!”
She lowered the shotgun. “I thought it was a b’ar,” she said. “I was going to shoot him and can him for the winter.” She smiled and showed her gums.
Good Lord, I thought. Canning bear. “I just wanted to—”
“Well, darn it, girl, I ain’t seen you since you was about this tall.” June held his hand out in front of him. He was lean, weathered and wrinkly, a little stooped, about seventy. He had a big toothless grin, thick glasses, and short gray hair that his brother must have trimmed for him.
I’d forgotten how chatty he was. Once he got to talking, he didn’t stop. He was like a child living deep in the woods. He knew very little about life outside. One time, he spent the night on our couch because the next day was the beginning of revival week at the church. I got up in the middle of the night to find him watching static on the television, sitting up straight as a board, his eyes wide. He had never seen it before, and he couldn’t look away. Boy, that gave me the shivers.
I remembered Wayne telling June about Jimmy’s accident when June was standing outside the gas station eating a candy bar. He came out to buy one about three times a year. After Wayne told him, June took the candy bar and threw it away.
June seemed to read my mind now. He stopped talking and looked down at the dirt. “I bet you miss him something awful.”
I nodded.
“I reckon it was his time.”
“Sure didn’t seem like it to me,” I said.
June just looked up into the trees and we listened to a woodpecker.
“I’m going to New York City to show a horse in a couple days.”
“What for?” he said, like I was telling him about some kind of tragedy.
“Wayne’s taking me. We’ll be back in a few days. Can I get something for you?”
“From up thar? Oh, I don’t need nothin’.”
“Chocolate?”
He smiled. “Chocklit would be nice.”
Walking back to the truck, I thought about why Jimmy had loved him so much. June was innocent. He was hidden away from the world. He knew everything he needed to know, and because of that, he never worried about a thing.
I wondered what it was like not to want more. I held it against the kids in Covington that they didn’t aspire to anything beyond what they had. But I admired June’s satisfaction with his quiet little life in the hollow.
June knew a side of Jimmy that no one else did but me. One time, June broke his hip falling out of an apple tree, and his sister had to push him into town in a wheelbarrow. Jimmy saw them coming down the road and drove them to the hospital, where June had to stay for three weeks.
Jimmy was worried that being in a hospital so long would kill June. I was standing by June’s hospital bed when Jimmy said to him, “How are you going to lie here for three weeks?”
June smiled. “I reckon I just will. Then there will be a day when it’s time to go home.”
THIRTY-FOUR
THURSDAY NIGHT WAYNE and I stayed up and loaded the trailer. Tack, brushes, braiding supplies, buckets, extra hay nets, feed, blankets, leg wraps, shipping boots, muscle rubs, a salt block, vet supplies, extra shoes, extra bits and tack.
Before I went to sleep, I opened Hunter Seat Equitation and read a few pages at random.
Once definite controls and an established position have been set at home, the rider is free to concentrate on getting his horse to perform well at a show.
George was right, except he was assuming he was talking to a normal kid with a normal horse. A kid who was following a training program with a real trainer and taking lessons four times a week on a made horse, not a rider who had pulled a gun on a crazy man in her own house just a couple of days earlier. Not a horse that had to show his ability by jumping over four feet of barbed wire and rotting boards.
It is much too late to worry about form while in a class.
It’s never too late to worry about anything, I thought.
Riding well is all that counts, and if faults are spotted, they must be put off as homework for the next week. One has enough to think of in controlling his horse’s pace, smooth transitions, riding proper lines and turns, and getting his fences. The very worst thing an instructor can do to a rider before entering the ring is to clutter his mind. It just makes matters worse.
If he only knew how cluttered my mind was already.
Friday morning we got up at five. Wayne made us breakfast while I wrapped Sonny’s legs and fed him hay. I didn’t give him grain because I didn’t want him to colic on the road.
“You got hoof polish? Mineral oil?” Wayne asked. Wayne had replaced his belt buckle with a shiny new one.
I nodded.
Wayne got in and started the truck. I got in and closed the door. Melinda was still asleep and I hadn’t wanted to wake her up, but when I turned, she was standing by the truck window in her bathrobe. “Call me when you get there.”
“Okay.” I lowered my voice. “Let the cat inside.”
She nodded and smiled. It was nice to be on the same side as her again.
“You be careful,” she said to Wayne.
“Bye, Mama,” I said. I hadn’t called her that in a long time.
“Bye, honey.” She kissed me on the forehead.
I looked back at the farm, but it was too dark to see anything. We were rolling, and Wayne shifted gears slowly as the truck powered up. A few moments later, Sonny started stomping
and slamming around in the trailer.
“What in the devil . . .” Wayne said.
The trailer shook hard and Wayne grabbed the steering wheel. He slowed down and looked at the side-view mirror.
“What’s his problem?” I asked.
“He misses his buddy,” Wayne said.
“We gotta bring Sub.”
“Damn it all!” he said.
He pushed down on the brake and the horse kept pawing loudly. We made a U-turn through a gas station.
Chester, one of Wayne’s old buddies, was filling his tank. “Y’all goin’ up to New York City?”
“We sure are,” said Wayne.
Chester laughed. “Y’all are crazy.”
Once we were facing home, the horse stopped pawing. When we pulled in, Sub was standing at the fence, calling loudly to Sonny, who called back and stomped in the trailer. Mama was at the window shaking her head.
“Pathetic,” Wayne said, looking at Submarine. “I ain’t heard that horse make a sound in years.”
I put up a hay net for Sub, and Wayne walked him to the back of the trailer. He hopped right in.
I thought about Kelly and her team of grooms. I bet they were loading her horses into a rig with a camera on every horse and monitors in the front. On second thought, Kelly was probably flying and meeting the horses there.
We drove through the winding roads of Bath County with the mist rising off the fields, up and over Warm Springs Mountain, through Goshen, past Craigsville, through the hilly streets of Staunton. Then we climbed onto Route 81 and powered up, getting in line with the tractor-trailers heading north.
We listened to the radio without talking.
After about half an hour, Wayne asked me if I was nervous.
“No,” I lied. “I just hope luck is on our side.”
“Sidney, if you work hard, day after day, you create your own luck. Thomas Jefferson said, ‘I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.’”
“He didn’t say that.”
“He sure as hell did.”
“You got that off a coffee mug at White’s Truck Stop.”
“Look it up. He said it.”
“Then what’s your excuse?” I challenged him. “You seem like one unlucky old bastard.”
“I ain’t talking about me. I’m talking about you.”
We stopped in Winchester to check on the horses. We gave them some water and got back on the road. The sun was bright, and Wayne put on his sunglasses.
“Can you see through those things?” I asked him. “They look pretty dirty.” He handed them to me. I wiped them off with a paper napkin and gave them back to him.
We passed into West Virginia, then Maryland right after that, and I realized I had never been this far north.
“I was riding to Covington with old Curtis—you know, Curtis who lives behind the piggery, works down at the mill, Joe’s son?”
I shrugged, not sure. I just wanted to listen. Wayne only told stories when he was relaxed, and that made me feel better.
“Curtis, he wears glasses, and he had his license picture taken with them glasses on. So we was going to Covington and there was this roadblock up, and Curtis said, ‘Daggone it, I don’t have my glasses on. I’m going to get a ticket. I got my glasses on in my license picture. Hand me your’n,’ he said. So he put on these glasses I had in the truck with no lenses in ’em.”
I started laughing at the thought of Wayne’s old friend wearing glasses with no lenses in them.
“So when we got to the roadblock, we stopped directly, and Curtis, he just looked straight ahead, and the deputy just looked at his license and looked at him and said, ‘Mr. Curtis, I s’pose you better get some lenses for those glasses.’ And Curtis said, ‘Oh my God, they done fell out of my frames,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe it!’
“Ha!” Wayne laughed so hard that he shook. “Ha! ‘They done fell out of my frames. I can’t believe it!’”
When he stopped laughing, I started, and then we just kept cracking up.
Right about when I realized I had six hours to do exactly nothing, whatever I wanted, anything, or all three, Wayne told me to do my homework. I shrugged it off and he snapped at me. “Girl, you do your damn homework or you ain’t riding.”
“Ha! You’re telling me I ain’t riding?” I said.
“You heard me. All that time you spend fighting about your homework, not doing it, explaining why you didn’t do it—well, you could have done it five times by then.”
Shit, I thought, he’s right. I thought about pointing out that he hadn’t gotten past the eighth grade, but that would have been stupid for a lot of reasons, and he had a mean-enough look in his eye that I didn’t want to fight about it. I opened up my biology book and started reading about plankton. I gnawed on my fingernails and shifted around in my seat, doing anything I could to avoid thinking about that God-awful boring book, but then I imagined having it all done. So I read it, and by the time we were in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, I had answered the last question and slammed the book shut.
The signs looked dirty, and the reflective pavement markers were battered, unlike the perfectly uniform reflectors on Afton Mountain. We drove along right next to a concrete barrier that shifted left and right to avoid construction. It made me nervous as hell. Wayne had both hands on the wheel, and his face had gotten tight. The shoulder of the highway was strewn with litter, a towel, a CD, food wrappers. It looked chaotic and a little wild, like it was every man for himself.
When the highway straightened out again, I relaxed and fell asleep. I woke up when we were pulling in at a truck stop in New Jersey. We left the horses and went inside for lunch, sitting where we could see them. I drank a Coke and used the bathroom. The people looked different from the ones at home. They had dark hair and looked a little harder, a little tougher on the outside, and they sure were in a hurry. They spoke fast and didn’t look you in the eye.
Finally, we saw the twinkling lights of New York City. I could not believe how beautiful and scary it was or that people lived and worked and ate and slept on that island. We’d lost the country station on the radio, and now we were getting music I’d never heard before. I felt chills going up and down my arms. It seemed crazy to bring these silly horses into this big city. I was so excited, I wanted to cry. I couldn’t look at Wayne.
I saw the Empire State Building in the distance, and it seemed both frightening and encouraging, like it was there for me. One of the horses stomped hard, like he knew something was happening.
I looked down at my lap. My hands were clenching the map and shaking. Wayne was chomping on a toothpick so hard, I thought he might swallow it.
“Yep, there she is,” he said. His voice sounded different than usual. His throat was tight. He must have been excited and nervous, too. I asked him what the buildings were for.
“I guess some of those are people houses,” he said. “Offices. You know.” City people were like bees in a beehive. I couldn’t imagine.
We lined up at the Holland Tunnel. The people in the cars looked bored. A couple of them cut in front of us, but then a shiny black Lincoln waved us in. I was glued to the window, thrilled and terrified.
We were getting ready to go through when I saw a sign up ahead: TRAILERS PROHIBITED.
“Shit,” Wayne said.
We were in a lane with no tollgate. He hit the gas, we blew through some kind of sensor, we heard somebody yell, and we went down into the tunnel.
Here we were, under a great river, in a tube of concrete and steel, with Submarine and Sonny. The yellow lights passed rhythmically across Wayne’s face.
We came out about five minutes later—not soon enough—into a cloverleaf of cars and signs and construction. There was a police car behind us and Wayne pulled over, but everybody started honking and the car went past us.
“What in God’s name . . .” Wayne muttered.
I concentrated on the map. “This West Side Highway will take you u
p to Thirty-Fourth Street, and that will take you to Madison Square Garden.”
He followed my directions to the West Side Highway. There were thousands of cars all jammed up next to each other, honking their horns. I was so glad not to be driving. I saw beautiful glass buildings that looked like mirrored pirate ships, a crazy cement building straddling a train track with plants and trees growing out of it, and cars, cars, cars, streaming everywhere. I rolled down my window and heard honking, music, laughter. Wayne clamped down on a new toothpick just as a helicopter landed right outside his damn window.
I just laughed. A helicopter! Landing right by the water!
“Good God Almighty, let’s just hope the horses don’t see that!” he yelled.
We turned onto Thirty-Fourth Street. People were honking at us, and I rolled my window up and slouched down. Wayne made a turn onto a street and then realized it was one-way and started to back up. He was getting tense as hell.
A driver yelled something at him that I couldn’t hear.
“Well, to hell with you, too—I got two horses in here!” Wayne said. Then he sighed and slumped down like he was at the end of his rope.
We circled around, passing the Empire State Building. I couldn’t see the top, but the doors on that building were beautiful. Wayne stepped on the gas, forced his way through an opening, and finally got us to Madison Square Garden—but we were on the wrong side. He swore, and we waited at a light to circle around the block.
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