Twenty Chickens for a Saddle

by Robyn Scott

  “I agree it’s a risk,” said Jonathan. “Anyway, I’m busy enough having the Aeronca fixed up – ”

  “I told you,” interrupted Grandpa, “I’m gonna bloody do it. Leave a legacy for the whole family. Doya think I’m just going to let a fortune languish under my nose?”

  Early next morning, before Jonathan left, he inspected the damage on the old aeroplane.

  The Aeronca, having stood untouched for several years in the field near Francistown, had one day been attacked by an angry bull, which tore some of the fabric-covered fuselage. Afterwards, the farmer announced he ‘was going to trash the plane if Ivor did not come and get it. Still Grandpa had done nothing. But Jonathan, who’d recently wrecked the Piper Colt and was feeling guilty, had organised a rescue mission during his university holidays. He, Dad, and several pilots working for Grandpas charter business had dismantled the battered aircraft and driven it to Selebi on a truck, where they’d put the body in the shed and hung the wings in Grandpa’s bedroom.

  More than a decade later, Jonathan had discovered that this Aeronca was one of just a few in the world, and a valuable collectors’ item. When he’d told Grandpa the good news, Grandpa had exploded indignantly. “Of course it’s bloody valuable. Priceless, probably. I could have told you that. Why do you think I’ve had it in my own bedroom all these years?” he’d yelled. “So I can keep an eye on the bloody thing!”

  Jonathan had offered to organise and pay for the Aeronca’s restoration. And now, as he stood on a chair in the bedroom and peered at the wings, Grandpa watched suspiciously.

  “You just make sure you look after it,” he muttered. “Can’t have just anyone messing ‘with this. It’s got to be done properly. Gotta be real professionals.”

  “Of course he’ll look after it, Ivor,” said Dad, who was inspecting the other wing. “That’s the whole point.”

  Grandpa threw his hands in the air. “Whaddaya mean, of course he’ll look after it? Look what he did to the last one.” He flung an arm in the direction of the wrecked Piper Colt lying beneath the thorn tree. “And this is an heirloom you’re dealing with. A treasure!”

  He paused for breath. Neither Dad nor Jonathan said anything. Everyone else waited, riveted. Grandpa had turned bright red.

  “Anyway, Keith, whaddaya know about value? Look at that beautiful island. Best opportunity you’ll ever get. Veritable tourist gold mine. Andya just wanna throw it away.”

  Up on his chair, Jonathan snorted. Dad started to laugh.

  “You boys have gotta learn some bloody responsibility,” bellowed Grandpa. “Here I am, trying to preserve something for the whole family. And you just wanna throw it away. Seloma wouldn’t do that. Now there’s someone who knows about families and responsibility.”

  Dad and Jonathan were by now laughing helplessly.

  “And my own children,” continued Grandpa, “think it’s some kind of joke. Have I taught you nothing?”

  ∨ Twenty Chickens for a Saddle ∧

  Seventeen

  Prizes For the Gifted

  The purple rosette pinned to Feste’s bridle was not quite the unambiguous triumph it should have been. On the one hand, a rosette was a rosette. And after more than ayear since I’d begun competing, this was just the second gold-embossed, superpleated Phikwe Riding Club ribbon Feste had to her name.

  I had, moreover, an admiring crowd – the only aspect of equestrian success I coveted even more than rosettes. Behind the arena fence, sitting on foldout chairs or perched on cooler boxes, watched at least forty people, sipping Cokes and beers.

  My eye-catching performance had even attracted a few white-clad observers who’d strolled over from the cricket field adjacent to the riding club.

  Everyone was smiling.

  Above the chatter, a hollow bark echoed between the tall koppies behind the arena. Baboons, somewhere high up amongst the balancing rocks and paper bark trees. I wondered if they were watching too, laughing at the weird humans below. With a special cackle for me: the weirdest of them all.

  Mum stood up and leaned against the fence. “Well done, Robbie.”

  I grimaced back.

  Mum and Dad beamed proudly. To them, I mused irritably, the purple ribbon probably warranted more vicarious pleasure than a normal prize. Given a choice between straightforward success and failure reinvented as triumph over adversity, Mum and Dad would choose the latter every time.

  Jill Davies, the competition’s judge, pinned a red rosette on the winning grey pony at the front of the line. Brian Fox patted his pony’s perfectly clean neck and grinned broadly as Jill shook his hand. Brian always won.

  I glanced wistfully at the three ponies beside me, smug with their red, blue, and yellow rosettes. Even yellow, a modest third place, would have at this moment filled me with unqualified joy. Even green, for that matter, had there been enough riders to award a fourth place, which there generally weren’t at the tiny Phikwe Riding Club shows.

  Anything but purple, the special prize: the stark public reminder that the two trajectories of my plan to transform Feste into a prizewinning show jumper and the plan’s execution would never meet; the big signpost ‘warning me that dream and reality were destined to be forever and irredeemably parallel.

  Jill returned to the dusty ‘white judges’ box and picked up the microphone. “A round of applause for all our riders,” she bellowed, “and a special cheer for Robyn Scott – inaugural winner of the Super Glue prize.”

  The Super Glue prize had been Jill’s idea, instigated specially for me after I had, in a feat of what seemed Herculean proportions, managed to cling onto Feste for an entire round of jumps, weathering a vicious and varied cocktail of bucking and rearing between each fence.

  Dad let out an ear-splitting whistle.

  A few adults raised their beer cans.

  I realised, as the triumphant William Tell Overture crackled though the speakers and we set off one by one on the victory lap, that Feste and I had got the biggest cheer – bigger even than the winning horse and rider.

  That was something at least, I thought, as we charged off in a cloud of dust.

  I grinned, despite myself. With Rossini’s rousing bars serenading our victory gallop, it was hard to feel too sorry for myself. By now almost eleven, I’d been competing in horse shows for nearly two years, and things had come a long way. In particular, I at least now looked respectable. My eccentric riding attire replaced gradually, my goal of normality had recently been fully attained with the purchase of my beautiful, longed-for new saddle.

  We’d made a special trip to Johannesburg to buy it, spending the weekend with the Jonathan Scotts and, on Saturday morning, driving out to the plush, leather-scented Western Shoppe, my favourite shop in the world. It had been thrilling: choosing the saddle, watching Dad pay for it – with some of my own egg money – and carrying the light leather work of art on my arm to the car. However, and although I would never admit this to Mum and Dad, that thrill was nothing to seeing the first chicken dust bath, to collecting the first egg, to selling the first dozen, standing beside Granny Joan at the Phikwe library on Saturday morning. And now, as we slowed and trotted out of the arena, and I glanced down admiringly at my gleaming pommel, I immediately thought of my twenty chickens, as I inevitably found myself doing, when I looked at the saddle.

  Improvements in Feste’s behaviour had been less dramatic. And, all things considered, the purple rosette was quite good going. For if the Super Glue prize was an unlikely award, it was nothing to its memorable predecessor, won nearly two years earlier at my first show.

  Jill Davies dropped Feste’s tail and scowled. “If I am not mistaken, Robyn, your pony has twenty ticks between her legs.”

  Her tone was one of disgust, her voice loud enough for all the other riders lined up beside me to hear. Maybe even loud enough to reach the ears of mothers standing behind the arena fence, mirroring the lineup of children, watching eagerly and relishing any black mark against the opposition of their respective o
ffspring.

  Twenty ticks was a jackpot – even if I clearly wasn’t in the running for a prize.

  I sank into my hideous orange saddle.

  “The fattest I’ve ever seen,” continued Jill, holding up a raisin-sized specimen for my inspection. She dropped it onto the dusty ground, mashing it ‘with her shoe. “Incredible.”

  “I took off lots already,” I said.

  But with a final disparaging look, Jill had already moved onto the next pony – a sparkling bay ridden by a glamorous grinning girl, whose neat hairnet shook as she giggled at Jill’s praise for her pony’s infuriatingly well-plaited mane. I looked down at the bulbous plaits on Feste’s neck and blinked back tears.

  The memory of this day was still painfully fresh.

  In the weeks before the show, delirious with excitement and naive self-confidence, encouraged by ever-enthusiastic Mum and Dad, I had entered every event for which I was eligible. Even then, drunk on optimism, I’d known that Best Turned-Out Pony was a bit of a gamble. Of all the classes, this one attracted the most entrants – about ten – and every other child had grooms to make sure their ponies were spotlessly clean and perfectly presented. In its favour, though, Best Turned-Out Pony only required walking into and out of the arena, which made it the one event in which there was a good chance I wouldn’t fall off.

  I entered – a decision I regretted the moment I rode out of the bush from Selebi into the frenzied activity of the Phikwe Riding Club stables.

  Everywhere, people hurried – between the stables, the cars, the tack room, carrying grooming boxes, sugar cubes, saddles, and bridles. Everywhere, there was noise. Mothers yelled at their children; children yelled at their mothers; mothers and children both yelled at their black grooms. The grooms, in turn, who couldn’t yell back, yelled at the ponies, which stamped and whickered crossly as they were scrubbed, tugged, brushed, and polished.

  The tension was palpable. And contagious. I felt sick.

  Mum and Dad, after declaring they knew nothing about turning out ponies anyway and could be better employed helping to set up jumps, were nowhere to be seen. Their jolly-well-do-it-yourself approach to life – the sell-eggs-to-buy-a-saddle-philosophy – did not end with the acquisition of material assets. If I wanted to enter Best Turned-Out Pony, I must, they argued, at the very least do the turning-out myself.

  Cruelly unfair as it now seemed, with no other option I dragged Feste into a pen and began. Stage one did not go well. I’d never plaited a mane before, and despite countless, increasingly desperate attempts, my plaits persistently ended up as wildly irregular tufts that bore no resemblance to the small neat knobs in the pictures.

  My only guidance came from six-year-old Lulu. Perched on the side of the pen, placating Feste with handfuls of hay, she critiqued each plait and offered irritatingly confident advice based on an experiential void matched only by my own.

  Occasionally, one of the other mothers or children walked past and stared through the bars of the pen in amazement.

  After two hours in the baking sun, there was no obvious difference in the plaits. A few of the other mothers began stopping and offering help or advice, a sure sign that I no longer posed a threat. Too proud to acknowledge defeat, I always politely declined.

  Then, with the event rapidly approaching, Lulu said, “I think your plaits are getting worse.”

  I shoved the packet of plaiting elastics in her hand. “You fix them then,” I snapped.

  “Okay,” said Lulu. She began undoing the bunches.

  “Don’t undo them.”

  “You told me to fix them,” she said, her voice quavering. “Stop freaking out, Rob’.”

  “I’m not freaking out,” I yelled.

  I moved on to Feste’s white socks, which, due to Feste’s loathing of running water, I’d been unable to wash. Here, at least, I had a skill-independent solution. I knew, from watching Lyn Nevill, that the secret behind Melaney’s pony’s bright ‘white gleam was Reckitts Blue. If you dissolved one of the blue cubes in a bucket of water, the light blue liquid dried leaving coats a brilliant white, similar to its effect on sheets.

  I mixed up a bucket and sloshed the mixture over each of Feste’s legs, feeling relieved to be making progress.

  Then, waiting for her legs to dry, I cautiously inserted my hand under her tail and began plucking off the ticks that clung around her bottom. Reluctant to crush them, I dropped them one by one onto the ground. The dirt at my feet was soon dotted with a large selection of both major tick varieties: the swollen soft-skinned grey ones (which sucked the most blood) and the flatter, tougher black ones (which tore out chunks of their victim’s skin when you pulled them off).

  The ticks began a slow trek in search of blood, radiating out from my feet.

  Lulu jumped down from the bars of the pen, abandoning the plaits.

  “What are you doing?”

  “If you just leave them there,” she said, “someone else will squash them.” Kneeling down, she began dropping the escaping ticks into an empty feed bucket.

  “Please hurry up, then,” I squealed desperately.

  The ticks collected, Lulu trotted off into the mopane trees outside the stables to release them. I continued to ferret between Feste’s legs. But by the time Lulu had done a second round, Feste’s tick community had barely halved. And those I’d already removed had collectively taken with them a lot of flesh. Feste’s bottom and teats were bleeding. With each new tick that I removed, she became angrier, lashing out when I felt for another.

  The Best Turned-Out Pony class was now less than half an hour away.

  I had to get changed. I abandoned the tick removal and ordered Lulu back to the plaits. At this point, I remembered the white socks, which I now saw to my dismay ‘were just as brown as before. Dizzy with panic, I charged to the hosepipe and refilled the bucket. In the hot midmorning sun, there was still just enough time for her legs to dry again. I grabbed two blue cubes, stirred them hurriedly into the water, and sloshed the new batch onto a now furious and prancing Feste.

  Then I quickly put on her bridle and saddle, helped Lulu roll up the last of the disastrous plaits, and ran to our car, where I crouched in the back, pulling on a pair of white jodhpurs, my newly polished black boots, a bright white shirt, and my new homemade velvet helmet cover. This made me feel calmer. I, at least, looked more or less presentable. I tied a silver horse brooch around my collar and examined it in the rearview mirror to check it was straight. I smiled at my reflection and dashed back to the pens.

  “Oh God, Lu, look.”

  Lulu, still absorbed in the plaits, looked down and giggled.

  “What are you going to do, Rob?”

  Feste’s legs were definitely light blue.

  Wet, I thought feverishly, had to be better than blue.

  I grabbed the bucket and ran once more to the hosepipe. Plunging a big green bar of Sunlight soap into the water, I lathered it up, spraying soapy water all over my outfit. Back at the pen I sloshed the third bucket at Feste’s legs. Then Lulu and I, each armed with a sponge, crouched in the mud at her feet and rubbed furiously at her legs, dodging well-aimed kicks.

  Time was up. I dragged Feste out of the pen, clambered onto the old orange saddle, and kicked her towards the arena, praying that by the time we were inspected, her legs would be dry white. Or at least dry brown.

  Fifteen minutes later, recovering from Jill’s shaming tick census, I wondered again what colour they’d dried. I was too embarrassed to ask Melaney, who sat beside me on her pony, gleaming from head to hoof. That Jill hadn’t mentioned it, I decided was an encouraging sign. Until I considered that Jill occasionally sported a small purple-blue streak in her hair. For a moment, I wondered whether she perhaps just admired my style.

  Gloomily resigned to failure, I watched as Jill and Floss van Leeuwen, the other visiting Zimbabwean judge, made their way from pony to pony – picking up a shiny hoof, running a white cloth over a flank, frowning at a pair of less than perfectly paral
lel plaits. If Jill frowned enough, Floss scribbled something on her clipboard, at which the child on top would look crestfallen and glare at his or her mother when the judges moved on.

  Lulu gave me an encouraging smile. I tried not to look at Feste’s plaits, definitely worse for Lulu’s efforts, and managed a grin.

  Jill and Floss reached the end of the line and strolled off to the corner of the arena. Whispering to each other, peering at the clipboard, and glancing at the lineup, they huddled there for several minutes. Then at last they fetched the rosette box and walked over to face the line of ponies.

  First place was no surprise. It was, as Lyn Nevill told me it would be, awarded to the child who had at her disposal Kopano, the best groom in Phikwe. Mother, child, and groom grinned modestly. Nor was second place, which went to a gleaming black pony that had come all the way from Francistown. Everyone cheered again.

  For third, however, the race was tighter: there were three eligible pristine ponies. It was anyone’s guess, and a hush fell over the crowd.

  “And after a very difficult choice,” said Jill, “Floss and I have decided that our third prize today goes to…” She paused, cleared her throat, and grinned. “Goes to Feste, ridden by Robyn Scott.”

  Silence. Then several unconvincing claps. All around, disbelieving faces.

  Jill shook my hand. “Well done,” she bellowed. Again loud enough for everyone else in the line to hear, she continued, “I’m giving you this because I suspect you are the only child who has turned out her own pony. Am I correct? Did you do this yourself?”

  I nodded, dumbly, wondering if I should give Lulu credit too. I didn’t.

  “So,” said Jill, “you deserve it. Even,” she added, leaning forwards and lowering her voice, “if your pony does have twenty ticks.” She paused. “Twenty-one, in fact. If you count the one I’ve just spotted in her ear.” She scowled at me and sighed. “Nevertheless, I suppose I’ll still give it to you.”