by Judy Blunt
Only time softened these facts into stories. The boy's death became a tragic lesson. The doors to the wheat bins by our shop were never chained shut, but in the years that followed, my father never missed a chance to remind us how grain slopes up the sides, how just bumping the wall can cause wheat to shift and pour down around you, pinning your feet in seconds. My father's mangled hand became a story of a wild ride to town and a doctor who administered morphine, but not until he identified the exposed nerves by twanging each one with forceps. Storms came together like patchwork, neighbors joining their individual accounts to create one shared experience: The blizzard of '64; the ice storm of 74; the winter of 77-78. How did you manage when the lights went out, when the lines went down, when the wind came up? How did you make it, what did you lose?
Stories are the lessons of a year or a decade or a life broken into chunks you can swallow. But the heart of a story lies in the act of telling, the passing on. Listening to stories, I learned what was worth saying and what need not be spoken aloud; I learned how we remember and whom we remembered and why; how facts are shaped or colored or forgotten. Few facts of my childhood remain. No one recalls my first words or when I spoke them. The patter of my first steps is lost in a blur of siblings who ran before or crawled after. What survives are the milestones, my family's oral history of near hits and close calls, stories of five children and our first steps into an adult landscape that made small allowance for age or ignorance.
The first story about me goes like this: The summer Judy was four she trotted into the kitchen, so full of importance you could have popped her with a pin. We had company, but she was holding something and I looked over to see what she'd dragged in. She had one of those big round cockleburs. She steps up to the table with it cupped in both hands. "A cactus just calved," she says, and holds up the baby to show it off. "I saw the whole thing."
It's hard telling what I have actually seen that day, perhaps a simple trick of wind and weeds, my childhood elements of weather and imagination. But by day's end I have seen the eyes around a table light up with genuine respect for wit, for the art of timing, the deadpan delivery. My parents look right at me and smile. That smile is not about innocence. By age four I had witnessed a wide range of barnyard conceptions and deliveries. Cats had cats and cows had cows, and I knew why. What do they see in my yarn about a cactus calving a cocklebur that makes it worth keeping and telling over and over?
I believe the-truth is this: the summer I was four I spoke my first good story and was born into my community, into the collective memory of my family, into a mythology that grew more real to me than fact. For the balance of my childhood I danced and waved on the fringe of a world denned by its miracles and natural disasters, observing and imitating, trying to amount to a good story—or barring that, to tell one.
The real adventures of Gail and the bull were less dramatic than my telling, but still one of many that grew around her, breathless episodes she listened to again and again with little interest and no comment. My story required a skill that was slow in coming. I wrote dog-frog-log poems and penciled witty news reports onto tablet paper, folding the wide-lined pages into fourths and stapling them along one edge to create a newspaper I called the Animal Farm News. I read and listened, a storyteller's apprentice who came to envy the deeds of heroes more than the craft of speaking them. I was clearly no match for my little sister. I could roughhouse and yell, throw rocks and tell jokes; I was a regular force of nature. But I could not be dainty and perky. My voice never had that high range needed to giggle. Gail was the baby of the family, even though she and Gary were twins, for she had the fine distinction of being forever twenty minutes younger and about half his size. Even better than her dimples, she was born with a knack for falling deathly ill and surviving, a skill Gary and I envied but were far too robust to accomplish. We picked at our chicken pox or scratched our measles, resigned to the drama on the other side of our tiny bedroom—Gail nearly comatose or raving with fever, Gail honking and whooping at every breath, a swathe of old sheets and menthol steam rising over the crib she fit until she was five years old.
Whether Gail held a charmed position in our family is debatable, but I believed it true and my revenge was real. Her story took shape in a decade of sibling warfare, with Gary or me cast as Goliath to her brash and fearless David. Prodded into a rage, cornered into fighting, she screamed and swung blindly, she bit like a weasel, she drove us back with sheer ferocity. An hour later she'd be back in our game. She would not give up. And even as we grew older and I came to understand the shame of bullying and my own lack of honor, I could not make myself quit.
I was born in 1954, the Year of the Horse, and the calendar came full circle on my twelfth birthday. When we trade stories about that time in our lives, my sister and I, that's what we call it—the Year of the Horse—though we both know we spent more than that lone year horseback.We had ridden the family horses since babyhood, and nurtured wild dreams of owning our own horses, like Margaret did. She'd gotten her palomino mare, Cream Puff, as a weanling filly, had raised and trained her, but we would never be that lucky, we thought mournfully. Descended from bucking stock, Cream Puff had an iron will, a tough mouth and a crotch-killing trot. My mother called her a dithering idiot. Fresh from the barn, she could shy sideways in ten-foot leaps, triggered by the flap of a grain sack or a passing car, or often enough nothing at all. But she could outrun anything on the place, and I loved her completely. The pony Gail rode belonged to her in a different way.
Like Gail, Feller was a born story, a gift from a neighbor named Frank Locke. One of the last old-time horsemen in the county, Frank raised cow horses, quarter horse with a touch of thoroughbred for speed. Like most of the old-time cowboys, he enjoyed good whiskey and a hot hand of poker. One winter a horse trader found himself on the hard-luck end of a game and tossed a bill of sale into the pot. Frank drew to an inside straight and won. When the game broke up, he drove to the stockyards to admire his new horse. No need to send for the truck. Home was seventy-five miles south, and Frank laughed all the way there with a full-grown Shetland stud hog-tied among the supplies in the back of his battered old station wagon.
Never keen on barn chores, Frank turned the pony out on open range, half expecting one of his big quarter-horse studs to kill it on sight, and no great loss at that. But Shetlands are nothing if not tough, and for the better part of a year this one kept pace with the real horses, pattering along behind the herd like a big shaggy dog. Frank found the sight amusing until the following spring, when not one but six of his rangy brood mares dropped button-sized black foals. Like any good businessman, he cut his losses. The stud hit the sale ring as a gelding. The foals he donated to a worthy cause. "Got me six little bastards that have to stand on a rock to suck," he bellowed into the phone, and by weaning time half a dozen farm families leaned against the corral admiring their free kid ponies. Our roly-poly new baby stood at the far end of the pen and watched us like a coyote. "Well, he's a cute little feller," Dad remarked halfheartedly, and we children nodded in unison. Feller it was.
Gifted with the speed and smarts of his mother, Feller had also inherited a black coat and a blacker heart from the Shetland side of his gene pool. He was built like a nail keg, short-coupled with no withers to speak of. A saddle cinched into place stuck for the first two jumps, then slipped and rolled onto his ribs. Mom started him early. Hat clamped over her hair to keep the dust down, her lips drawn to a grim line, she balanced her horse-sized saddle in the middle of his back and rode with her spurs nearly dragging the ground until he mastered the walk of a perfect gentleman, a veneer of civility. This battle of wills took not weeks but months. We met him halfway. About the time he grew wise, we grew large enough to take the beating. Mom dusted off her gloves, pronounced him a kid horse and turned us loose. The moment she left the corral, his ears slid back. He kicked, he bit, he scraped us off on fence posts and corral rails. He veered under low-hanging Cottonwood limbs at a dead lope, clearing his
back in one sweep. We knew about "one-way" horses, the kind that bolt when you step off to open a gate or rub their bridles off when you tie them. Feller combined all versions of the one-way horse into one compact package. "You might as well walk as ride him," Kenny would grumble. "Either way you'll come home afoot."
Feller tolerated Gail best, perhaps because she weighed the least. She returned a love that bordered on obsession, stubbornly defending his mischief even as she limped out of the barrow pit, victim of a hit-and-run with a Cottonwood tree, and watched his dust streak toward the barn. She knew what it felt like, the pain of being littlest. She called it spirit.
"For God's sake, Gail, you don't show one glimmer of sense," Mom would snap, patching her up after one wreck or another. And for a year or more, that went for both of us. We took to the wild, losing ourselves on bareback gallops through the meadow, flying over the jumps with our eyes closed, drunk on speed and power. That was the year I nurtured my first tangible fears of growing up and developed an emotional range that began with passionate outbursts and ended with sullen silence. My body was bent on treason. I retreated, pulling the last of what passed for my childhood around me like a shroud.
That fall, Kenny left home for high school. That fall, my sister Margaret waited in the kitchen for Dad to finish putting gas in the car and Mom to finish dressing for town. She too was leaving, just as she had left home every fall, first to go to Malta High School, then to start college at sixteen. This leaving seemed no different. The bags and boxes piled by the door held everything she owned. The rest she held in her hand, a slip of paper with formal print and blank lines written over in ink. She offered it casually and I took it in my own hand, turned it around to read. A bill of sale: Sold to Judy Blunt for the sum of one dollar, one (1) palomino mare. My heart lurched. I owned Cream Puff, the one possession I had coveted for years. Margaret's face was impassive and I drew myself away, barely able to breathe through the collision of joy and grief. My sister has given me her horse. She is never coming home again.
And that long year, as I turned my back on the adult world I found myself face-to-face with the innocence still visible in my little sister. My attacks on her had grown more sophisticated over the years, a verbal sniping almost as savage and satisfying as fistfighting. She had no reason to trust me. Yet when I turned to her for companionship, she swung in beside me without hesitation, following my lead with a loyalty so unswerving and undeserved it was frightening. I needed her story, this child of fierce emotion and blind courage, for I could not find my own.
Gail took Feller over the ditch flat out, her jeans barely lifting from his back as they lit and sawed to a stop on the opposite ridge. Cream Puff jigged sideways, dancing under me as they swung around to face us. Our hay meadow stood out against the backdrop of prairie like a fat green caterpillar on a bare branch, a field that curled and clung to the banks of Beaver Creek, rows of new haystacks dotting the arch of its back. Easing the reins, I grabbed a fistful of blond mane and leaned over the mare's neck. Her front feet left the ground and the irrigation ditch rose like a welt against the smooth contours of the meadow, a break in the dark alfalfa that greened over the stubs of the first cutting. Slicing through the heat, the mare's hooves pounded up a smell of damp soil, bruised alfalfa and horse sweat, a taste I carried on the back of my tongue. I clamped my knees, feeling her stride shorten to a sprint as we neared the lip of the ditch and the split-second connection— muscles drawn under us, bunched, pushing off in one stride—and the release of riding airborne.
Atop the ridge, Gail and I leaned over to rub the sweaty necks. Summer vacation stretched behind us, weeks we lived horseback and out of yelling distance from the house. Mornings were filled with chores, but after lunch Mom took a break, settling down with a book while Gail and I cleared the table. We left the front door slightly ajar when we slipped away, for the noise of it closing often broke the spell. Walking with forced casualness toward the barn, we marked the milestones by increasing our speed. Past the front gate, the clothesline, the chicken house, alert for the slam of the screen door and a voice rising in the heat behind us. Out of sight but still in yelling distance, we raced through the barn grabbing bridles and a bucket of oats, then out the wide rolling door to the horse pasture, to freedom. As the horses finished the grain we poured on the ground, Gail and I jackknifed our bodies over their necks, grabbing for mane and sliding into position as they flung up their heads. Saddles were for sissies.
I nudged Cream Puff with my bare heels, lengthening her stride until Feller's shorter legs had to jog to keep up. Gail didn't complain,, though she knew I did it to be mean. She kept watch from the corner of one eye. I pretended to stare straight ahead. The summer showed on us all. Our horses were trim, ridden down to good manners. Our legs had grown so strong we no longer held on with our hands, even bareback at a full gallop. We were riding easy. The seat of my jeans had worn a bald spot on Cream Puff's back, a heart-shaped mark that winged out on either side of her backbone just behind the withers. I worried that it might not grow in. Winter was coming. I was restless and edgy.
The hottest part of the year held on, and Second Creek ambled through the meadow like a low, twisting road paved with tiles of parched gumbo that crunched underfoot. Dropping over the steep bank, we rode in the dry creek bed, ducking occasionally to avoid brush that grew along the lip of the creek at head level, aiming east toward the bridge and the fence. Knotting my reins, I fell back and closed my eyes, head rocking side to side on my mare's rump as she picked her way beneath the willows that draped the steep banks on either side. Behind me, Gail lay back on Feller, reins slack, guiding him with her feet. In the long stretch of linked potholes the willows grew thickly above us and the air was cool and green. Here the horses moved slowly, pausing to brush away flies, willing to stop if we'd let them. But in places the deep channel disappeared, ending in a deer trail that led the horses up and over a steep dike pierced by a culvert and irrigation head gate. Other detour trails plowed through the thick willows to avoid potholes still holding the green, mossy gruel that passed for late-summer water. We rode flat on our backs with our eyes closed and the reins knotted over the horses' necks, guessing from the movement, the feel of the muscles bunching and stretching, when we hit a detour in the creek bed. We had to lie still until the last possible second, the moment our horses settled on their haunches to lunge up the steep trail, before we sat up and took hold of the reins again. It was easy to get dumped riding this way, for the horses were full of tricks and wise to the opportunity we gave them, but we'd gotten too good at the game and I lost any real interest halfway across the meadow.
In the late August sun I was in long sleeves, with my coat zipped to my chin. The gray fake fur was matted with chaff and reeked of sweat, but as we lunged up the last trail and emerged into the meadow, my muscles clenched. Pain traced from my lower belly to my inner thighs like something tearing loose, slow moving, deeper inside than anything I inflicted on myself. I was bleeding again. The battle had shifted, a loss of ground, but I hadn't given up. The outhouse sat idle unless the electricity failed, and I kept my stockpile of toilet paper and clean rags there. I was still winning. No one knew except me, and I could choose not to know. It was the chill I couldn't shake, the feeling of legs grown too long and heavy, arms that lay like dead meat.
Lost in my own thoughts, I didn't turn until Gail's hand touched mine, then lifted again, pointing to a dark mound across the field. The porcupine waddled toward us with an air of purpose, dragging its tail through the hay stubble, making a beeline for the cottonwoods along the creek. I had read stories of men trapping the mountain streams who left them alone, even when they raided stores of bacon or chewed up saddles in the craving for salt. If stranded and starving a man could run down a porcupine and kill it for food. A porkie could save your life. But here where trees were more dear, they were not revered. The animals ate bark from saplings and older trees, often girdling the trunks and killing them. Whenever my father noticed new d
amage to trees along the creek or had to pull a beard of quills from a cow's face, he went cruising in the pickup after dark, shining his spotlight up the trees and along the branches, alert for the flash of eyes, the dark burl against the trunk, aiming his rifle as instinct turned the animal butt-first to the light.
This porcupine lumbered nearer as we watched, a tree creature, landlocked and graceless. Something in his awkward shuffle, his wrongness, ate at me. I slid from Cream Puff's back and tied her to the willow behind us. We did not speak, but at some level I heard Gail's feet touch down, the sound of branches shaking where she looped her reins, her footsteps dogging mine as I searched along the creek bank. The thick branch I pulled from the underbrush had bleached white and was cured hard as a baseball bat. The porcupine peered nearsightedly down his nose, tipping his head to gather sound and smell, then changed his angle of approach, aiming for trees to the right. He had twenty feet to go when I swung, bouncing the limb off his back. Instinctively, he tucked his head and curled around his soft underbelly, his quills bristling outward, his tail rigid and ready to lash at us. I raised my arms again, savoring the stretch of muscle coming to life, calmed by the power that drove the branch. Beside me, Gail lifted her own stick in an overhand swing.