She pushed the wooden gate open, waited for a space, then walked Ian across the sand, asked him to stand, and she mounted from the ground. Then she urged him to go forward to join one circle or the other, but nothing happened. He stood rigidly, his head held up to the limit of the restraining martingale. Teagan squeezed him as hard as she could with her legs, but her horse didn’t budge. She pulled a foot from the stirrup, swung her leg back, and booted him in the flank. He lunged forward. She hauled on the reins and stopped him, and got her foot back in the stirrup. She wondered what he was doing. He seemed startled and confused. Then she realized that maybe he’d never been in an indoor arena before.
She let him stand a minute, and she looked around. In front of her, girls were bobbing up and down in posting trots, their horses moving nicely forward, relaxed, or girls had their horses at polite canters, the horses themselves looking collected, their tight canter strides only a couple of yards long. She watched a pigeon flutter to the sand and watched a horse and rider ignore it, as the pigeon got out of the way of hooves. This happened repeatedly. The pigeons jostled each other off the high rafters under the peaked tin roof, their flapping only slowing the descent to the sand, where they were almost run over by unflappable horses, and then the pigeons flapped to launch themselves again.
Teagan needed to join the line. She saw a clipboard in Miss Jessie’s hand. She asked Ian forward and he went, trotting, which she didn’t ask for, and then he stopped suddenly, raised his head as high as he could, and whinnied, his body trembling to make the sound. The sound carried around the arena, but he got no whinny in return. She didn’t know what he was doing, maybe looking for an ally, but the horses continued under their riders’ hands, doing what they were directed to do.
She was feeling a little desperate now and wanted to get him to the wall and moving around the arena. His thousand-pound horse flesh seemed rooted to the spot. She tried to turn him and couldn’t. He whinnied again, shaking her in the saddle. She slipped her foot from the stirrup and booted him in the flank three times, which did nothing. Finally he took a step sideways, and she pushed him in that direction, and he fell into a trot. She directed him toward the wall, but then he stopped again so suddenly that she lurched forward in the saddle. She recovered. The other instructor, Miss Brenda, called all riders to the center. Teagan saw her chance. Ian would move with the other horses. As they turned and walked, passing him, she pushed him forward, and finally he went, walking with the group.
Standing next to the other horses, Ian turned his head to sniff a horse’s neck. Teagan patted him, glad he seemed calmer, but the rider glared at her. She pulled Ian’s head around. The instructors explained that the trial would consist of walking, trotting, and cantering in both directions, and then they would be jumping a small course. Not hard, Teagan thought. Basic stuff. No problem.
When the horses went to the wall again, she made sure she moved Ian with them. She stuck to the horse in front of her, keeping a polite enough distance. She finally had him along the wall, moving to the left at a trot. Miss Brenda called out that it was too crowded and half should go the other way. The horse in front of Teagan turned, and without her asking him, Ian followed the horse. She pretended that she’d meant to go. At least he was still in line and trotting forward. She was on the inside now, the other line of horses passing her on the left. Ian was agitated. He seemed startled again.
He stopped, she wasn’t expecting it, and the horse behind her had to stop quickly. She muttered an apology and the rider passed her, and she got Ian moving again. His trot turned into a canter, and when she tried to put him back in the trot he gave a small buck and tossed his head. She swore. She slowed him, and it seemed as if her body would break with the effort it was taking to keep Ian at the trot. She was trying to keep a polite horse length between her and the rider in front of her, but Ian kept wanting to put his nose right up to the tail of the horse.
Teagan finally caught on. Ian was foxhunting, or at least he was trying. Keep up with the horse in front, move as a group: go all together, stop all together, turn all together, a herd of horses—not individual horses with individual riders who give individual commands. She could give him only a second of sympathy, because she wanted him to trot when she asked, stop when she asked, and keep a polite horse length between himself and the rider in front. How hard could that be for him, really?
It was hard. Ian was confused. She had no time to teach him, no time to adjust. She had to perform and he was the horse and he was supposed to listen to her. Fat chance. The corners were the worst. Around the short end of the arena, Ian couldn’t tell that the horses were simply moving in a line going the other way—he thought the horses were coming right at him, and he tried to move to the side, or back up, and he would shudder against Teagan’s straining legs and arms, and kick out of self-defense or desperation. It happened at both ends of the arena. Fortunately the arena was large, and so it took a good minute or two before she reached the ends, but then she felt him shudder and balk again, and knew the kick was coming. She started drifting out of the line, trying to move him away from oncoming horses, which meant that she messed up the distances in her line, and the horse behind her had either to slow down or pass her. She was about to give up when Miss Jessie called them all again.
Teagan knew that she and Ian hadn’t been any good. She wondered what was written on the clipboard. At least Ian could jump. He was a natural jumper. He would have no problems. She watched as each girl left the line, trotted up to the white cavalletti jumps, took her horse over the little jumps, one, two, three, and cantered away in a straight line, then trotted her horse to the back of the group. Teagan had this. This was cake.
Ian didn’t have it. It was not cake for him. He apparently found it terrifying to be the only horse moving while the others stood still. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t foxhunting. They were all supposed to move together, to approach the jump as a group and separate for the briefest of moments to take the jump, then group up again. Ian moved slowly away from the group, even though Teagan was pushing him with all her strength, and he weaved toward the jumps, his head turned back, looking for the other horses to follow. She finally got him somewhere near the first rail. Her approach was completely off, not straight at all, and then she asked him to jump. She didn’t care where they were. She didn’t care if the jump was beside them and he had to go over it sideways, she just wanted him to go. At the last moment Ian seemed to see the jump, and he casually humped his large frame over it, then sped across the next two and was at a flat gallop at the other side, racing to get back to the herd standing in the center.
Teagan stopped him at the back of the line and tried not to look at anyone.
She jumped the line two more times before she was dismissed. Each time was bad. Ian didn’t understand leaving the group, and he wanted to get the jumps over with as fast as possible so that he could get back to the other horses. She struggled with him, and he ignored her. She hated him.
A select group of girls stayed behind while the jump heights were raised, but Teagan was told to leave along with the other, average, sort-of-good riders. She knew Ian could jump the higher jumps. He could do it with his eyes closed, if there had been a fox and some hounds around. In the field he would have been perfect. Stupid horse.
Teagan walked by herself up the hill to the dorms. She was relieved to find Julie in the room. Julie played piano and knew nothing about horses.
“How were tryouts?” Julie asked.
Around Town
Teagan stuffed the blue slip from her mailbox into her backpack and went to class. When the bell rang to end the third period, she looked down at the page in her notebook and realized she hadn’t written anything down. At lunch she found reasons to keep getting up from the table so she didn’t have to talk.
“Why don’t you get your food all at once?” Sarah complained after Teagan bumped her arm for the third time.
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“Teagan likes courses,” Julie teased.
* * *
—
Friday night she didn’t want to watch the movie in the common room.
“It’s really scary,” Aleah said, excitement in her dark eyes.
“I’ll have nightmares,” Teagan said.
Sen linked arms with Sarah. “You’ll change your mind,” she said and they left.
It was rare to be left alone in the room. All the new girls had similar schedules, and they moved from place to place in groups. Julie and Teagan’s room had become the hangout for their friends, who walked in all the time without knocking. Teagan hoped the other girls were too interested in the movie to stop by. She thought she might read. She sat cross-legged on her bed with a novel held limply in her hands. When Julie ducked into the room for her warm slippers, Teagan was asleep.
In the morning, she stayed in bed while Julie got dressed and ready to go to breakfast. She nodded briefly at Julie’s offer to bring back toast. Teagan fell asleep again. When she finally got out of bed, she felt exhausted. There was a stack of cold toast on a paper napkin on her desk.
* * *
—
Later that afternoon Julie ran across the lawn and threw her arms around Teagan. “Where the hell have you been? I checked the infirmary. Sarah said you probably ran away.”
“Ran away? Where to?”
“Did you go for an extra-long walk or something?”
“My dad picked me up.”
“Your dad?”
“I guess I forgot to tell you.” She saw the look on Julie’s face and said, “He lives about an hour from school. I thought you knew that.”
* * *
—
The truth was that Teagan hadn’t known it. When her father had picked her up, she felt she wasn’t able to look him in the face. They went to the Red Filly for lunch, and Teagan kept quiet about having been there before. She ordered a grilled cheese and barely tasted it. Her father told her about his new job.
Afterward Robert wanted to walk around the little town. Teagan stifled a yawn as they walked. Robert landed a weighty hand on her shoulder and rested his palm on the back of her neck. “Yawning?”
Teagan glanced at his face. “I went to bed late.”
“You stay up as late as you want?”
“On weekends. We watched a movie.”
Her father was her father, the man she remembered, but she was having trouble with how she felt, standing next to him. He had hurt her mother. He had left them. She’d known about the other woman. She thought of Charlie. He and her father were alike. She pictured Charlie alone at Blue View. She felt stunned with the extra realization that her father had left Charlie, too. Her father’s hand was hot on her neck.
“Are you riding?”
“Yes. Lessons.”
“They have horses at your school?”
“I have Ian,” she said.
“You do?” He turned her head toward him. Teagan shook her head to get him to let go. He seemed big to her. Looming. She couldn’t distance herself from him. He had spoken the words as if he was playing a game with a baby—his voice overly happy.
“I do.” She wanted to stop herself from asking, “Do you miss him?”
“He’s a great horse. You’ll have a great time.” Robert was strolling on. The buildings along Main Street seemed to thin out. Set back from the road was a slatted wooden fence, and beyond was field. In the middle distance was a small red barn. “Looks just like Blue View.”
Teagan thought it didn’t look anything like it. “Yep.”
“We’re looking for a house. Lisa doesn’t ride, but I found a great piece of land. It has a shed we could turn into a barn. You could keep a horse there.”
Her thoughts seemed to crash. She wondered if she should point out that she was his daughter, or simply that she had no idea what he was talking about. She just looked at him, his mouth moving, saying things that made little sense to her, and the purple and green skin under his eyes. She felt she could have been anyone, a ghost. He was still talking.
“I hated mowing all that grass. Every weekend, god. A farm is so much work. One thing after another. There was always something falling apart.”
My mother, she thought, and she remembered her father on the blue tractor in the field.
Thought
Same as it was. The same getting up and lying down. Same days and same doings. (Don’t you know?) Same comings and goings. (Could have said it yourself.) The tasks, the exact motions of fingers and hands. What is described? Riding a horse. (No.) Just that. (Liar.) Think about this, the metal buckles, nylon soaked with sweat, dust, dirt (once soil) under the nails. Smells of grass and flatulence. Something is poignant, like the point of a fur-lined ear. (Feathered.) (Almost pointed.)
Robert Bought the Horse (Because It Bit Him on the Arm)
Teagan led Ian out of his stall and tied him. She stepped back and looked at him for so long that he swung his big head around and looked at her. His eye was large, round, dark. His ears flicked toward her, then one flicked backward toward the sound of a sliding stall door, the hollow thump of a plastic bucket. He lifted his head and strained to see out the inset window. His ears flicked forward again. She knew he spent every day, twenty-four hours, in the stall. He wanted outside. He, the horse. Her father’s. Not her father’s anymore. Not her father, maybe. He didn’t seem to miss her, much. He didn’t want his horse. So he was hers. This animal. This big man’s horse. The horse didn’t seem to care about her, much. He seemed to be looking out, all the time. Looking for someone other than her. Waiting for his owner, his rider. She thought, I’m what you get. And then she thought, You’re what I get.
She picked a brush out of her bucket but crossed her arms and kept looking at the horse. He didn’t need brushing. Shirley groomed him. But she was used to routine and felt odd about tacking him up without first running a brush over him. Ian grabbed at the rope with his floppy soft lips. He held it in his mouth for a moment, then let it drop. Teagan thought how bored he must be, looking at cement walls. It was the first sympathetic thought she’d had for him. She. He. Her “he.” She’d have to figure him out; there was no one else to relieve him of his cement box. She thought, Because you are left behind. The brush pulled easily over his well-groomed hair. Down both sides, working away from the spine, down all four knobby legs, a swipe at the long feathery hairs at the back of each hoof, no dust there, no field to pick it up from, she worked around the large body. At his head she lightly held the leather noseband of his halter, keeping his head low to brush it. When the bristles edged his nose, he grabbed for them. She held the bristles for him to sniff. He smelled the brush and lost interest. Just him. She stroked his long face and leaned her forehead on his face and breathed in his horse scent. She wanted to be comforted. After a moment he tossed his head and his bony jaw knocked her temple. She rubbed the place, tossed the brush in the bucket, and wiped her eyes.
He didn’t need his hooves picked out, but she lifted each one anyway, briefly scraping the soft underside. She yelled and dropped his leg and swiped at the empty air behind her. He’d nipped her on the butt. She turned around. His head was forward; he made no move toward her. She looked at his big dark eye. He blinked his long eyelashes. The nip hadn’t hurt her; it had surprised her. She turned again to lift his hoof and sensed his head come closer, but when she straightened and turned, he had looked away. This was not behavior she liked. “Oh good,” she said, “You bite.”
Ian moved quicker than she could react. His blunt teeth caught the skin of her arm. He let go immediately, and she raised a hand to hit him in the face, but the horse threw his head up high, the dark eye rolled back in the socket and the white showed, and his head trembled against the rope that tied him. Her hand in the air, she watched this and realized he was afraid of her. She dropped her hand. He dropped hi
s head. Slowly, she reached for his halter. He lifted his head again, not as high, and she caught the halter and tugged. He struggled for a minute but she held, the muscles in her arm tightening, and then he stopped pulling. With her free hand she reached to stroke his face. With both hands she worked his head toward her until the tension left his neck. She pulled his nose to her body and spoke softly. He lipped the loose hem of her shirt. She moved his nose away.
“How about this: I won’t hit you if you don’t bite me,” she said, knowing he wouldn’t keep his end of the bargain. As an experiment, she turned and lifted his hoof as if to clean it, and sure enough, she felt him turn toward her. She reached a hand behind her and waved it around, coming into contact with the soft side of his retreating nose. She turned back around and stroked his long face. Maybe he thinks we’re both horses, she thought, thinking of times she’d seen horses in the fields use their mouths to nip and annoy each other, and sometimes to itch each other’s backs. He’s being a horse, she thought.
* * *
—
She figured out that, along with his horsey strength, he was perceptive and sensitive. One spoken word was enough to get his attention. Her hand on his side could direct him from the ground. She could get him to back up with a hand against his chest. She became a quieter rider and began to realize why her mother and her father had liked the horse. He was good and he was experienced. When she found the right way to ask him, he could do anything. She could speed him up or slow him down with lightly given commands. A little pressure from her leg or lifting the reins told him what to do. He could maintain a canter at different speeds. If Charlie had let her drive his manual-drive car, she would have likened the horse’s paces to the gears. The only things that worried her a little were his limitless energy and the times he looked toward the fields, when he could see them, and she felt as if he might bolt, run flat-out, jumping whatever fences he came to. She thought about what she would do if he did run away with her. Hold on, she decided, and not fall off.
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